Radiohead enlisted a full symphony orchestra and choir for their latest record A Moon Shaped Pool, which they recorded in a former 19th century mill in the south of France. That is to say, the group aren’t afraid of drawing inspiration and techniques from the past to crank out records in 2016.
In fact, the opposite might even be true; despite pioneering the whole “bleep-bloopy electronica meets good ol’ fashioned guitar jams” thing, the group has enjoyed a prickly-at-best relationship with some more modern aspects of the music industry.
Namely, streaming. Back in 2013, frontman / manic pixie Thom Yorke went ahead and claimed Spotify was “the last desperate fart of a dying corpse” – the corpse, of course, being the music industry.
“I feel like as musicians we need to fight the Spotify thing… it’s all about how we change the way we listen to music, it’s all about what happens next in terms of technology, in terms of how people talk to each other about music, and a lot of it could be really fucking bad.”
Note: it ain’t because of Yorke’s stance. Rather, the record was held off due to a long-running rights stoush – likely related to its self-released nature – which has miraculously been resolved.
It comes just in time for A Moon Shaped Pool’s Spotify release on June 17, when all of you paranoid androids can listen to their discography top-to-bottom. For the mo’, get around this twinkly, jazzy masterpiece riiiiiight now:
Photo: David Wolff – Patrick / Getty.
