The future is dire, the past a blur and the present heartbroken yet hinting at possibilities on Radiohead’s “A Moon Shaped Pool,” its ninth studio album and perhaps its darkest statement — though the one with the band’s most pastoral surface.

Radiohead worries throughout the album: about environmental devastation, about mass thoughtlessness, about love gone cold, about finding some way forward. “You’ve really messed up everything,” Thom Yorke sings in “Ful Stop,” one of the album’s few up-tempo songs, though it uses its insistent beat for jitters, not pleasurable motion.

On this album, grim tidings arrive amid gorgeous backdrops: gentle pianos and acoustic guitars reinforced by a string orchestra. Multilayered tinklings and murmurings give the music a subliminally shimmering aura. But this is Radiohead, whose beauty is always laced with dread; for the most part, “A Moon Shaped Pool” is an album of nightmare lullabies. In “Daydreaming,” a somber, undulating piano waltz, Mr. Yorke croons, “Beyond the point of no return/and it’s too late, the damage is done.” The album’s opening track, “Burn the Witch,” is a spiral of tension, cryptically portraying a society ignoring its own witch hunts as a clattery, insistent string arrangement ratchets up the dissonance and agitation.

Throughout the album, the state of the world and the state of the singer’s heart shade into one another. “When I see you messing me around, I don’t want to know,” Mr. Yorke sings in “Identikit,” and whether he’s thinking about personal, political or corporate betrayal — or just about the way facial features can be interchanged and messed around with in a police Identi-Kit — is unclear, even after the Beatles-tinged chorus arrives: “Broken hearts make it rain.”