Radiohead Surprises With Early Release

On Valentine’s Day the band announced that its first album since 2007, “The King of Limbs,” would be released digitally five days later, on Saturday, with a retail CD arriving March 28 and an elaborate package, including vinyl discs, billed as the “Newspaper Album,” on May 9. Unlike the pay-what-you-will policy for the “In Rainbows” album online in 2007, the band set prices: $9 for MP3 files and $14 for CD-quality WAV files. Then, keeping listeners off-balance, it suddenly released the album Friday instead.
Since, by my guess, about 99.8 percent of Radiohead fans are online, there was a tsunami of Internet buzz and instant reactions, like this one, to an album that is likely to reveal itself far more gradually. Near the end of “Separator,” the album’s finale, an echoey Thom Yorke croons, “If you think this is everything, you’re wrong.”
“The King of Limbs,” named after a gnarled ancient tree in a Wiltshire forest, holds eight songs in just under 38 minutes. The sonic abstractions that have fascinated Radiohead since “Kid A,” back in 2000, are essential to “The King of Limbs,” and the band’s new songs use them brilliantly. Most of the new album is so vertiginously layered that it’s plausible the band spent nearly four years in the studio making it.
“In Rainbows” had a long and often public gestation, with Radiohead road-testing new songs onstage while speculation raged until the band, free of its major-label contract, decided how to release it. By contrast, it seems “The King of Limbs” materialized out of secret deliberations, with most of its songs previously unheard by all but Radiohead and the inner circle that includes its producer, Nigel Godrich.
Mr. Yorke played the exception, “Lotus Flower,” on tour with his band, and he dances, twitches and partly lip-synchs through it all by himself in a new video clip. It’s the new album’s most down-to-earth, hip-shaking song, as well as its most sustained melodic one. While the lyrics bemoan “an empty space inside my heart,” they also offer what could be the album’s mission statement: “I will slip into the groove and cut me up and cut me up.”
One song, “Feral,” does just that: It programs a galloping rhythm and a throbbing low bass line akin to the British dance music called dubstep, and chops Mr. Yorke’s vocals into unintelligible stray syllables.
Rhythms, loops and noise are the makings of “The King of Limbs.” So are reflections on what might be rapture or annihilation, or (sometimes simultaneously) on the strains of a shaky romance. Radiohead irregularly posts what it’s listening to on its Web site, and spooky experimental dance music has long been one of its staples. Even with more decipherable verses, songs rarely concern themselves with what the five-man band — Mr. Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, his older brother, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway — might be able to perform onstage. The parts within Radiohead’s arrangements fan out across beats and bar lines, meshing in ways that overdubbing and programming can accomplish more easily than human hands.
“Bloom” opens the album with loops of piano, drums and less identifiable instrumental tones. A staggered rhythm barely resolves itself as a dazed ballad, and the production keeps mutating, sprouting strings and horns and who knows what else: “Open your mouth wide/A universe inside,” Mr. Yorke sings.
“Morning Mr. Magpie” has a more clearly delineated underlying riff, but it’s disputed by cymbal taps and overlaid guitars. “Little by Little” has intertwined acoustic guitar picking and a descending chord progression akin to older Radiohead songs like “Reckoner,” but even more than its predecessors, it is engulfed in percussion. It’s an infidelity song: “The last one out of the box/The one who broke the spell,” Mr. Yorke sings. “I’m such a tease and you’re such a flirt.”
The closest thing to the sound of live music is “Codex,” a piano dirge hinting at suicidal thoughts, with an abyss of reverberations under its instruments. “Give Up the Ghost” offers the comforts of an acoustic guitar and a wish for benediction — “Gather up the pitiful in your arms” — against a phantom choir of Mr. Yorke, shakily harmonizing with himself. Is he singing, “Don’t hurt me” or “Don’t want me”?
By now, Radiohead’s evasion of standard music-business practices is ancient news, but the band may still be thinking about pop’s economy of copying and dissemination. “Morning Mr. Magpie” complains, “You’ve stolen all my magic/Took my melody.” But the new songs demonstrate otherwise. More likely, Radiohead is defying that mindset, creating exactly what it wants on its own timetable, to make another sudden digital splash.
“The King of Limbs” is Radiohead in its familiar richly depressive mode: full of pained longing and fixated on musical nuance, getting lost in sound and then clawing its way out beautifully. As an album, it’s too brief. But these are songs to dive into.