It takes a while—longer than ever before—to locate the underlying songs on A Moon Shaped Pool. The leap the band has made for this album initially might seem small but actually is profound: less a shift in instrumentation than in outlook, structure, and the intended sources of gratification from the music. By deleting their Internet presence before its release, Radiohead may have been suggesting a new era, and indeed, this is the first album of theirs that suggests a post-pop world. Accordingly, A Moon Shaped Pool delivers little joy but a whole lot of beauty.

The band arrives at this new paradigm gradually over the course of the album, with the first two songs (also the first two singles) making clear they could record another “classic” Radiohead album if they wanted to. The main innovation of the opening tracks is a lushness that partly reflects Greenwood’s recent work in the classical-music world. “Burn the Witch” uses strings as diesel for the band to vroom along the familiar turns of verse/chorus/verse/chorus, a format whose manipulative power is deployed sarcastically here (as it has frequently been for protest singers). “Sing a song on the jukebox that goes ‘burn the witch,’” Yorke squeals, a quick dig at catchiness itself.

Then comes “Daydreaming,” a delicate waltz whose swirling pianos and lilting vocals are flecked with little bursts of sound that resemble rewinding tape. Yorke sings about having crossed a point of no return, and by the end of the song, noise has replaced prettiness. The amusical rumble of a backmasked, pitch-shifted Yorke saying “half my life” may be a reference to him having recently split with the woman he’s been dating for, yes, half his life.

Stipulated: If it was controversial to see Lemonade as Beyoncé’s autobiography, it’s probably criminal to go around talking about A Moon Shaped Pool as a breakup album for Yorke, who, the legend goes, wrote parts of Kid A off of phrases pulled from a hat. Nevertheless, this album makes the most sense when heard as a document of a wrenching chapter for one human being. Of course, there are larger apocalyptic themes here too; “The Numbers,” formerly entitled “Silent Spring,” pretty clearly asks the world to not give up on reversing climate change. But no longer is Yorke’s music mostly about dread—it’s about what happens after the dreadful and inevitable has arrived. The video for “Daydreaming” is instructive as to the answer: Yorke is in a daze, wandering through brief visions of alternate realities and lives, alienated from the notion of existence as a linear narrative.

The real source of the album’s triumphs and frustrations is the production. In nearly every bar of music, Nigel Godrich (who has said he channeled his father’s death into the making of A Moon Shaped Pool) adds in panning and zipping sounds, or suddenly replaces one instrument with another, or manipulates reverb into new shapes. It’s not that the music’s crowded—the sound here is somehow roomier, airier than ever—but that so many elements are continually mutating in unusual ways. In the micro, the change is fascinating; in the macro, disorienting. Maybe that’s part of why the band opted for mostly slower material: to let the textures become the main event. These are sculptures before they’re songs.