Radiohead release new album A Moon Shaped Pool

Radiohead released their long-awaited ninth album, A Moon Shaped Pool, on Sunday night.

The album is available on iTunes, Apple Music and Tidal, but has yet to arrive on Spotify. It was mistakenly posted on Google Play earlier on Sunday but was soon taken down, and has not yet reappeared on the platform.

The release was announced by the Oxford group on Twitter:

Fans had expected movement from the band after they deleted all content on their website last weekend.

Then on Tuesday they posted a video for a new song, Burn the Witch, which is the first track on the album. The video, which uses animation in the style of the Trumptonshire trilogy, the children’s animations made in the late 1960s, has had more than 10m views on YouTube.

Its animator, Virpi Kettu, said the band may have wanted to increase awareness of the issue, especially “the blaming of different people … the blaming of Muslims” that leads people to want to metaphorically “burn the witch”.

On Saturday, another track followed, Daydreaming, which has a video directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, whose films include Boogie Nights and There Will Be Blood.

In the six-and-a-half-minute video, frontman Thom Yorke walks through spaces including a hotel corridor, an empty home, a hospital, a shop floor, a forest, a snowy mountain, a beach and a vacant car park. It has had just over 3m views in little more than 24 hours online.

Guardian music writer Harriet Gibsone said of Daydreaming: “It loops and shifts as if trapped inside a dreamlike state until Yorke’s journey ends, curled up in a mountain cave; Jonny Greenwood’s lush orchestration adding to its cinematic suspense.”

Radiohead’s last album, The King of Limbs, came in 2011. Since then, the band’s members have worked on various solo projects. Drummer Phil Selway released his second solo album, Weatherhouse, in 2014, while Yorke toured and recorded with Flea, Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker and Mauro Refosco on the Atoms for Peace project. His solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, was released in 2014.

The Radiohead album is also available to download from amoonshapedpool.com and will be available on vinyl and CD from mid-June.

For £60, $86.50 or €76 fans can acquire a special edition that contains the 11 tracks across two pieces of vinyl and one CD, with another CD of additional tracks, 32 pages of artwork and a digital download available now.

The package, which ships in September, contains a piece of a half-inch master tape from an actual Radiohead recording session.

“The tape degrades over time and becomes unplayable. We thought rather than it ending up as landfill we would cut it up and make it useful as a part of the special edition. A new life for some obsolete technology... Each loop contains about ¾ of a second of audio - which could be from any era in the band’s recording past going back to Kid A. You may have silence, you may have coloured leader tape, you may have a chorus... It’s a crapshoot. We have copies. Don’t worry.”

The 11 tracks on A Moon Shaped Pool, which happen to appear in alphabetical order, are:

Burn the Witch

Daydreaming

Decks Dark

Desert Island Disk

Ful stop

Glass Eyes

Identikit

The Numbers

Present Tense

Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief

True Love Waits

Ful stop is the longest track at 6:07, while Glass Eyes is the shortest at just 2:52.