I've been looping Radiohead's A Moon Shaped Pool this week, and I'm struck by how age has changed everything about this band—and about grief itself.
The album opens with "Burn the Witch," and immediately you're inside an anxiety dream rendered in strings. There's a paranoia here that feels ancient and immediate at once, the orchestral arrangement swooping like surveillance cameras. But it's "Daydreaming" that breaks me every time. Thom Yorke's voice moves through the track like someone walking through empty rooms in a house they used to know. The Mellotron doesn't accompany him so much as haunt him.
This isn't the band that gave us OK Computer's digital apocalypse or Kid A's alien transmissions. This is Radiohead at their most human, most vulnerable. Jonny Greenwood's string arrangements feel like what Brahms might have written if he'd lived through climate collapse and Brexit. There's a romanticism here, but it's romanticism that knows better—beauty that refuses to look away from what's broken.