So I’m sure you haven’t heard or anything, but there’s a new Radiohead album out today. Well, the digital version, at least. Ditching the pay-what-you-want method of their last album, In Rainbows, Radiohead is offering The King of Limbs as a “Newspaper Album”, which entails two clear 10″ vinyls, a CD, and over 600 pieces of artwork, as well as the digital copy, which can be purchased separately and is available right now. The physical copy costs $48 or $53, and the digital download costs $9 or $14, for .mp3 and .wav formats respectively. However, it’s hard to criticize a band that allowed, even if only at one point, fans to pay whatever amount they’d like for an album, and it’s understandable that they might want to make some money this time around.

The method of sale isn’t what’s important. Radiohead is a band of a certain caliber. When they put out an album, people take notice, and there’s a reason for that. They take music to places that most other bands can only dream of reaching, combining grandiose stadium tendencies with obtuse, inaccessible noise and sounds, blending genres and pushing envelopes in everything they do. The fact that it was formally announced less than a week ago and then randomly released a day early, plus the band’s inherently high prestige, really adds to the general reverie about The King of Limbs. It’s gonna be hard to avoid the hype, even if you’re not a Radiohead fan.

The King of LImbs is surprisingly minimalist, very restrained in a lot of ways, and subtle. It’s also very concise, consisting of eight tracks that span almost 38 minutes. Further, it’s very electronic-oriented, which will garner the obvious comparisons to Kid A, and Amnesiac, their two more abstract and electronic releases, as well as Thom Yorke’s solo material, and rightfully so. A lot of it really does resemble the style of the music on Yorke’s The Eraser, with a dose of traditional instruments thrown in alongside the digital bits. Not only is the album highly electronic, but a lot of the songs almost have a trance feel to them, largely due to the use of unwavering computerized beats.

The album starts with “Bloom,” an appropriate title for an opener, a song with sporadic bass over a jittery, almost anxious beat, under-riding swells of vocals and vocal effects. The second track is an older song that never found its place amongst their releases, called “Morning Mr. Magpie,” or as it used to be known, “Morning, M’lord.” They’ve upgraded it from its jangly acoustic sound into a sleek, shiny product, featuring a frantic, hypnotic guitar accented with light percussion, interwoven occasionally with pulsing, winding basslines. “Little By Little” has a very interesting texture due to the exotic acoustic riffs under the two-note duality of Johnny Greenwood’s guitar riffs, a style he uses often nowadays, and the layered, hyper percussion. The chorus, hauntingly intoned by Yorke in his mysterious falsetto, is one of my favorite parts of the album. “Feral” is a gripping combination of drawn-out sounds over a brisk beat, with a subdued dub(step) groove to it provided by the Colin Greenwood’s bass. “Lotus Flower,” the first single off the album, is also perhaps the most straightforward song on The King of Limbs. It’s ethereal, yet heavily driven by the bass with some seriously dynamic drums. It also has a music video featuring Thom Yorke doing his thing by himself in front of a camera, kind of like Jamiroquai’s “Virtual Insanity” on meth. Which is interesting, not something I’d have expected from him, but cool nonetheless. “Codex” is a simplistic piano song by Thom with a light beat and a great melody, and kind of splits the album; the previous section is the more electronic side, and “Codex” and on are more natural sounding sounds. “Give Up the Ghost” is a rich acoustic song that Thom has played independently before. Though the song is pretty sparse instrumentally, with two guitars and a bare beat, the focus here is on the multiple layers of vocals, with multiple Thoms singing “Don’t hurt me” under and around each verse. The King of Limbs culminates in “Separator, which is a nice blend of the album’s musical philosophies. It’s lofty and dreamy, dominated by strong bass, with little details added here and there in the form of subtle and repeating guitar riffs. It’s also the only song on the album with a traditional drum beat. It’s kind of the antithesis to the final song of their last album, “Video Tape,” which had a definite air of finality to it. In the song “Separator,” the lyrics go, “If you think this is over / Then you’re wrong,” as well as “It’s like I’m falling out of bed / From a long, weary dream.”

Some have even posited that, due to those lyrics and the fact that if you buy the full package you get two 10″ vinyls, this is only the first of two discs. Radiohead did this with their last album, including a bonus disc with the Discbox In Rainbows release. I’m not holding my breath, but I’m certainly not against it happening. It’s interesting that for as far as this album goes in Radiohead’s progression, it’s more of a subdued effort. Johnny Greenwood probably could have gone nuts with the effects on the album, but he seemed to restrict himself to guitar duty for the most part. It’s also a bit strange how minimalist some of the songs are; at times it almost seems like a drum’n'bass project with Thom singing. Other times it’s a more natural song featuring both guitarists, and Thom singing. It’s like everyone just got a few turns with Thom. Either way, this is a small but dense package of great music, and yet another impressive step forward in a long line of them. Hopefully it’s like Thom says: “If you think this is over / Then you’re wrong.”