Lunar reflections: A Moon Shaped Pool a decade later

Try as I might to correct it in my head, the existence of A Moon Shaped Pool still seems like an impossibility.

Rewind to early 2016, and the five-year span between it and 2011’s The King of Limbs felt like possibly the longest time I’d ever waited for a record to materialise.

At the time I was in a dead-end agency job in a probation office, spending my working hours greeting offenders and booking them in for appointments. Paedophiles, house burglars, petty thieves – not the kind of people you want to spend your days forcing small talk with. I’d plod through the 9-5 with one eye on the clock, shuffling papers and checking the r/radiohead subreddit for hints of the elusive ‘LP9’.

To call it a hyper-fixation would not be an exaggeration.

The wait did strange things to people. I posted last week asking for people’s memories of the time, and one user recalled another saying he would eat a picture of Thom’s face if the record wasn’t released by a certain day. “Or maybe they were just eating a photo of Thom’s face every day until it was released”, u/3erikspersullivan wrote, recollections already fuzzy from the passing years.

Another remembered the panic when the tracklist was revealed, as we all scrabbled to work out if it was real (the fact that it was alphabetical seemed suspect). For a while, users relayed conspiratorial theories about the band’s w.a.s.t.e. site, until one intrepid redditor checked the HTML to prove it was fading to white.

To this day I haven’t experienced a hype cycle like it. The moment lead single ‘Burn the Witch’ dropped was a collective rush, a sense that the sheer force of obsessive fandom had willed this thing into existence. Above all, there was the realisation that we’d finally get to hear studio versions of ‘Present Tense’, ‘Identikit’, and – most coincidentally – ‘True Love Waits’.

There was a palpable sense that A Moon Shaped Pool was a thank you to the fans – a confident collection of ideas new and old, tastefully produced and rich with orchestral elegance.

So why, a decade on, does it feel so cold, opaque, and ultimately unknowable?

***

How many records have the power to drag you back in time to the first moment you heard them?

Perched on a farm gate in the middle of the New Forest, shafts of light slashed through cloud cover as I hit play on A Moon Shaped Pool, immersing myself for the first time in the staccato strings of the opening seconds. By the time the final piano chords of ‘True Love Waits’ faded away, the sun had dropped below the fields to welcome the creeping dusk.

I sat there for a time taking it all in. There was an intangible conflict in my head; on the one hand, a deep pleasure at finally getting to hear a project many of us fans thought might never arrive. On the other, an itch I couldn’t scratch. What was this niggling feeling?

Like a lot of people, my relationship with Radiohead formed early and stuck.

Ever since I borrowed The Bends from my mum’s CD collection and became hooked on ‘Planet Telex’, I was unwittingly binding myself to the group. When In Rainbows dropped in 2007, I downloaded it from the ‘pay what you want’ site and had my mind blown. To this day, it’s one of my most cherished records (I acknowledge this is not an original opinion, but hey, there’s a reason it’s so loved!) Even The King of Limbs – a record widely considered to be B-team Radiohead – I find to be a beautiful springtime listen. The jittery pep of ‘Good Morning Mr. Magpie’, the gentle flow of ‘Codex’; it all still sounds magical to me.

On paper, A Moon Shaped Pool should comfortably slot alongside those albums: long-gestating fan favourites finally realised, lush string arrangements, a band with nothing left to prove.

Speaking to BBC 6 Music back in 2016, Yorke traced the history of ‘Burn the Witch’ to the early 2000s, inspired by a ‘name and shame’ campaign by the tabloids. Papers like the News of the World were outing sex offenders and printing their addresses, resulting in mob violence on the south coast of England.

“Burn the witch
We know where you live”

‘The Numbers’, meanwhile, found him circling a familiar anxiety within a new one: how to write about climate catastrophe without people switching off. “If I sing ‘river running dry, the system is a lie – painful cliché, but it’s also true. What am I supposed to do? It was a weird fight with myself, ‘can I get away with this?’” he laughed. “Or should I write another lovey-dovey song that means nothing? Is that what the world needs?”

Then there’s ‘Daydreaming’ which, despite being only the second song, feels like the emotional centrepiece of the record.

There has been plenty of speculation about this record’s connection to Yorke’s former partner, Rachel Owen, who died of cancer six months after the record was released. He’s always resisted this framing: in an interview with Q Magazine around the time of the album launch, he refused to be drawn on A Moon Shaped Pool being a ‘break-up record’, and when asked shut the conversation down: “I don’t want to talk about it… I feel like the dust hasn’t settled.”

Still, it’s hard not to hear that context echoing through the record. ‘True Love Waits’ was written decades earlier in the mid-90s, becoming a live set fan favourite. Here it’s rendered in its most fragile form, a duet of Yorke’s voice and gentle piano.

“I’ll drown my beliefs
To have your babies”

In 2019, Yorke said on Desert Island Discs: “When the kids’ mum died, it was a very difficult period and we went through a lot. It was very hard. She suffered a great deal and my ambition is to make sure that we have come out of it all right, and I hope that’s what’s happening.”

Those facts lend a gut-wrenching sadness to moments across this record, encapsulated in the shortest (and perhaps best) track, ‘Glass Eyes’. Ever since my first listen, it cemented itself as one of the most exquisite of the band’s entire discography.

Moments like this bestow an abject beauty on A Moon Shaped Pool, but they’re pockmarked across it, stutters of undefined confessionals.

It’s only half the story. Alongside them, you have the driving motorik rhythms of ‘Ful Stop’, bringing modern paranoia to a 70s Krautrock sound. ‘Identikit’ has a minimal funkiness, driven by off-kilter backline contributions from Selway and Greenwood (the Colin variety). The origin of ‘The Present Tense’ can be traced all the way back to 2009, immortalised on this record as a shuffling acoustic bossanova.

A Moon Shaped Pool might be a lot of things: a tribute to a loving mother, frustration with the media, anger at a system sliding the planet towards climate catastrophe. It’s a canvas of ideas shaped and reshaped over the years, carrying the baggage of past lives and past selves. While the orchestral arrangements – largely the work of Johnny Greenwood – give it a sense of cohesion on the surface, nothing really locks together. There’s always a sense of drift.

I’ve always felt that Radiohead records announce themselves with clarity: the warmth of In Rainbows, the paranoia of Kid A, the political urgency of Hail to the Thief. They feel like cohesive eras in the band’s history, existing with their own unique centre of gravity.

Ironically, A Moon Shaped Pool never quite manages it. Its accumulation of songs from different moments in time leaves it feeling fragmented, like overlapping statements pulling in different directions.

The closer I think I am to connecting with it, the more it seems to withdraw like the lunar tide. But I think that’s why I still frequently return to it all these years later, transporting me back to that New Forest field as the light shrinks.

Not because I understand it any better, but because I still don’t.