On Valentine’s Day the band announced that its first album since 2007, “The King of Limbs,” would be released digitally five days later, on Saturday, with a retail CD arriving March 28 and an elaborate package, including vinyl discs, billed as the “Newspaper Album,” on May 9. Unlike the pay-what-you-will policy for the “In Rainbows” album online in 2007, the band set prices: $9 for MP3 files and $14 for CD-quality WAV files. Then, keeping listeners off-balance, it suddenly released the album Friday instead.
Since, by my guess, about 99.8 percent of Radiohead fans are online, there was a tsunami of Internet buzz and instant reactions, like this one, to an album that is likely to reveal itself far more gradually. Near the end of “Separator,” the album’s finale, an echoey Thom Yorke croons, “If you think this is everything, you’re wrong.”
“The King of Limbs,” named after a gnarled ancient tree in a Wiltshire forest, holds eight songs in just under 38 minutes. The sonic abstractions that have fascinated Radiohead since “Kid A,” back in 2000, are essential to “The King of Limbs,” and the band’s new songs use them brilliantly. Most of the new album is so vertiginously layered that it’s plausible the band spent nearly four years in the studio making it.
“In Rainbows” had a long and often public gestation, with Radiohead road-testing new songs onstage while speculation raged until the band, free of its major-label contract, decided how to release it. By contrast, it seems “The King of Limbs” materialized out of secret deliberations, with most of its songs previously unheard by all but Radiohead and the inner circle that includes its producer, Nigel Godrich.
Mr. Yorke played one exception, “Lotus Flower,” on tour with his band, and he dances, twitches and partly lip-synchs through it all by himself in a new video clip. It’s the new album’s most down-to-earth, hip-shaking song, as well as its most sustained melodic one. While the lyrics bemoan “an empty space inside my heart,” they also offer what could be the album’s mission statement: “I will slip into the groove and cut me up and cut me up.”
One song, “Feral,” does just that: It programs a galloping rhythm and a throbbing low bass line akin to the British dance music called dubstep, and chops Mr. Yorke’s vocals into unintelligible stray syllables.
Rhythms, loops and noise are the makings of “The King of Limbs.” So are reflections on what might be rapture or annihilation, or (sometimes simultaneously) on the strains of a shaky romance. Radiohead irregularly posts what it’s listening to on its Web site, and spooky experimental dance music has long been one of its staples. Even with more decipherable verses, songs rarely concern themselves with what the five-man band — Mr. Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, his older brother, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien and Philip Selway — might be able to perform onstage. The parts within Radiohead’s arrangements fan out across beats and bar lines, meshing in ways that overdubbing and programming can accomplish more easily than human hands.
“Bloom” opens the album with loops of piano, drums and less identifiable instrumental tones. A staggered rhythm barely resolves itself as a dazed ballad, and the production keeps mutating, sprouting strings and horns and who knows what else: “Open your mouth wide/A universe inside,” Mr. Yorke sings.
“Morning Mr. Magpie” has a more clearly delineated underlying riff, but it’s disputed by cymbal taps and overlaid guitars. “Little by Little” has intertwined acoustic guitar picking and a descending chord progression akin to older Radiohead songs like “Reckoner,” but even more than its predecessors, it is engulfed in percussion. It’s an infidelity song: “The last one out of the box/The one who broke the spell,” Mr. Yorke sings. “I’m such a tease and you’re such a flirt.”
The closest thing to the sound of live music is “Codex,” a piano dirge hinting at suicidal thoughts, with an abyss of reverberations under its instruments. “Give Up the Ghost,” another song Mr. Yorke has previously performed, offers the comforts of an acoustic guitar and a wish for benediction — “Gather up the pitiful in your arms” — against a phantom choir of Mr. Yorke, shakily harmonizing with himself as he sings "Don't haunt me."
By now, Radiohead’s evasion of standard music-business practices is ancient news, but the band may still be thinking about pop’s economy of copying and dissemination. “Morning Mr. Magpie” complains, “You’ve stolen all my magic/Took my melody.” But the new songs demonstrate otherwise. More likely, Radiohead is defying that mindset, creating exactly what it wants on its own timetable, to make another sudden digital splash.
“The King of Limbs” is Radiohead in its familiar richly depressive mode: full of pained longing and fixated on musical nuance, getting lost in sound and then clawing its way out beautifully. As an album, it’s too brief. But these are songs to dive into.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 19, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the number of songs on Radiohead's new album that had previously been performed live.
Damon Winter/The New York TimesA member of Pulp performing on Friday at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, Calif. More Photos »
INDIO, Calif. — Well, in the end it’s a business. But so it is at the beginning, and in the middle. 
Breaking news about the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia and more.
A sortable calendar of noteworthy cultural events in the New York region, selected by Times critics. An ambient question about the three-day Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which ended on Sunday — or did it? — was whether the knowledge that it would be repeated exactly one week later in the same place and in the same order might alter the minute-by-minute feeling of it. You know, make it less special. Take away its aura. Does Coachella have an aura? It did once. At large destination pop festivals, impressive surprises are experienced as acts of generosity: a balloon rising into the vast desert sky, a three-hour set. This is what unites large numbers of people and makes them feel innocent. Not the weekend’s quick-stop onstage guest appearances, from macro (Rihanna with Calvin Harris, Usher with David Guetta) to micro (the weirdo rapper Gonjasufi with the Los Angeles D.J. Gaslamp Killer). Moments like those are as much for celebrity blogs and YouTube clips as they are for music fans. They don’t make you, standing in the crowd, feel particularly innocent. This year more than ever, the sets felt like jobs with a bit more self-promotional energy. I don’t remember a lot of shared awe. Will the surprises be better next weekend? Who knows, but it’s unlikely, with much less news media present. This festival was founded 12 years ago on the premise of indie rock, which is, or has at times been, an art of innocence and skepticism — in other words, ideals. It’s grown out of that to become a festival of popular and semi-popular North American, English-language noncountry music, a megamart of sound for college kids. It’s strong on Grammy winners, breakout acts from South by Southwest and the CMJ festival from a year or two ago, and, at this point, second-tier reunions. And dance music, which is likely to alter Coachella’s future more than any of the genres it has flirted with over the years. Aesthetically, it’s almost uncontainable, which is neither good nor bad; it’s just breadth, Spotify made real. The oxymoron of a unique cultural event set to rerun was, obviously, a way to sell more tickets — 75,000 more — without making the festival too crowded. And that plan worked: both weekends sold out, and the crowd felt at capacity but no more. (Except in the dance tent, where many came to stay, and late arrivals squinted to watch house D.J.’s like Sebastian Ingrosso, Avicii and Kaskade.) The security felt nonintrusive and often invisible, as it should; this is a calm audience. I saw violence only once, during the Death Grips’ set on Friday. That band, from Sacramento, has a great idea: nonidiomatic digital dance beats (sort of Southern hip-hop, sort of reggae, sort of hard-rock) with Zach Hill’s hypercreative, improvised live drumming on top, and Stefan Burnett’s mostly unintelligible yammering raps and chants. It’s bad-dream music, strong and strange, with dirty rock riffs occasionally drifting in: Pink Floyd’s “Astronomy Domine,” Link Wray’s “Rumble.” It’s music that can start fights, and it did. The two-part festival is a big deal for music on the West Coast, and not just at the festival site, the Empire Polo Club. It means that a lot of these bands play other club and theater shows in Los Angeles before or after the festival weekends — many of them also booked by Goldenvoice, the festival’s promoter — and some of them run up to San Francisco in between the shows. In 2012 the headliners didn’t define the festival or, on the face of it, lure concertgoers to spend money specifically here — as opposed to, say, Sasquatch or Lollapalooza, in May and August, each of which has about two dozen of the same acts as Coachella in its lineup. Most of the names in the biggest type were acts that have been seen a lot in recent years, in touring circuits and wherever else: the Black Keys, Swedish House Mafia, Bon Iver, Radiohead. Anyway, innocence. You saw it projected onstage rather than felt by the audience, as part of the music’s artifice, in band after band with cool eyewear, retrospective yearnings and the trebly sound of Fender Jaguars and Jazzmasters: Girls, Yuck, EMA, Ximena Sariñana, M83, the Shins, Real Estate and even the R&B singer Frank Ocean, beset with sound problems, singing beautifully and moving diffidently. It was left to Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, on Sunday night, to work the surprises. They performed wall-to-wall hits from 10 to 20 years ago with a pile of guests: Eminem and 50 Cent; Wiz Khalifa as rap’s present; the Los Angeles rapper Kendrick Lamar (who performed “The Recipe,” a new Dr. Dre production) as its future; and, as its past, a full-body holograph of Tupac Shakur, digitally pacing the stage and appearing to ask Coachella what was up.
INDIO, Calif. — Well, in the end it’s a business. But so it is at the beginning, and in the middle. 
INDIO, Calif. — Well, in the end it’s a business. But so it is at the beginning, and in the middle.