When approaching a band's debut album, one should of course bear in mind the sage advice of George Michael and Listen Without Prejudice. Nevertheless the very facts of the making of Atoms for Peace's Amok seem designed to send a certain kind of music fan screaming from the room without hearing a note. It is, by any definition, the work of a supergroup: as well as Thom Yorke and long-term producer Nigel Godrich, it features Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea, "guest percussionist" Mauro Refosco and REM's Joey Waronker. Amok resulted from their gathering together to indulge in "freeform" sessions in Los Angeles, having apparently bonded over a shared love of "getting wasted … and listening to Fela Kuti". Rich and famous musicians jamming in LA after getting high and kicking back with some funky ethnic sounds: it's hard to get away from the feeling that this is just the kind of thing that once provoked people to form the Cockney Rejects in protest. It is, to borrow a phrase sighingly deployed in Smash Hits with some regularity, like punk never 'appened.

Anyone who understandably finds their inner Stinky Turner rising up in indignation at all this is not much likely to be mollified by Godrich's comparison of Atoms for Peace's working techniques to fusion-era Miles Davis, rock stars equating themselves with jazz greats coming just beneath rock stars equating themselves with classical composers in the list of stuff that made a generation less tolerant than our own break out the safety pins and gobbing. In fairness, the method to which Godrich is referring genuinely isn't far removed from that used by Davis and producer Teo Macero from In a Silent Way onwards: he and Yorke filleted sections of the band's lengthy jams, edited them together, then weaved the results into electronic arrangements. You can hear this at its most straightforward on opener Before Your Very Eyes. It starts out sounding just as you'd expect an afrobeat-influenced track by Thom Yorke featuring Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers to sound: pattering drums, scratchy guitar, bassline that is, to all intents and purposes, jumping around with its top off, and Chuckles himself keening away about nameless dread. But each instrument is gradually replaced by an electronic counterpart, until, by the song's end, only Yorke's voice remains untouched: the scenery around it has completely changed.

Elsewhere, the interlacing of instruments and electronics is so fluid it's hard to work out where the band ends and the computer begins. The traditional supergroup works on the principle that great music is born out of each member's inflated sense of their own importance chafing against everyone else's– as a 1974 feature in Time magazine put it, they are "fuelled by dueling egos" and "musical infighting builds up the excitement" – but the music here appears to flip that logic on its head: no member is as important as a laptop. You listen to something like Reverse Running, on which a rhythm track bearing the audible influence of 2-step garage is so intricately entwined with Waronker and Refoscos' percussion that it sounds as if it's been put together using a pair of tweezers, wondering at precisely how Atoms for Peace – formed, lest we forget, for the specific purpose of playing Yorke's solo material live – are going to play it live.

As a technical exercise, Amok is hugely impressive: in contrast to Yorke's undercooked solo album, The Eraser, its sound is rich and deep, full of intriguing shifts and contrasts. But there are times when it feels the painstaking process used to create it may have assumed a greater importance than the business of actually writing songs. Default has a great central motif, but the song it's attached to drifts by without leaving much impression. Something similar happens on Stuck Together Pieces. You could happily listen to its gorgeous descending bassline all day, which is perhaps just as well, given that what's going on over the top of it feels pretty slender and sketchy. In a recent interview, Godrich made a passing remark about Yorke really wanting to make a straightforward dance record but feeling that, "I have to sing on it or no one's going to fucking care". It was meant as a joke, but occasionally during Amok you wonder not only if there's a grain of truth in it, but whether Yorke might not have been better off acting on the impulse.

Still, when Amok works, the results are spectacular. Ingenue's warping, off-key analogue synth and dripping-water sound effects would make a great dance track in their own right, but the vocal melody they're matched to is as sublime as anything Yorke's ever come up with. The closing title track is simultaneously writhingly funky and strangely haunting: it builds up to a crescendo you could describe as ecstatic, not an adjective regularly associated with Yorke's work or worldview.

"As much as I try to resist the temptation, I really want to say, 'This is the beginning of something'," offered the singer last year when questioned about Atoms for Peace's future. And that's what Amok sounds like: a striking, if flawed, first step. However offputting the band's genesis may seem, it's hard not to be intrigued as to where they might go next.