More Details About Radiohead’s New Album, A Moon Shaped Pool

Hardcore Radiohead fans have been pouring over A Moon Shaped Pool, the band’s dark-yet-beautiful ninth album.  (Check out my track-by-track review here.) Meanwhile, news about the record keeps coming.

Nothing on Spotify. Soon? Eventually? Never?

A hard copy version in the form of a standard CD will be available through XL Recordings on June 17. Packaging will be in silver foil and the gatefold sleeve will contain a 12-page booklet.

A vinyl edition will also be available as of June 17. The album’s 11 songs will be divided up over two 180-gram records. It will come in a gatefold sleeve with a silver foil cover. Inside will be a card good for digital redemption of 320 kpbs MP3s or 16-bit WAV files.

Come September, there will be a special edition release. Vintage Vinyl News describes it as follows:

• Case bound album, inspired by the albums for 78rpm shellac records in the library of La Fabrique, France
• 32 pages of artwork
• The 11 track album on two heavyweight 12″ vinyl records
• Two compact discs: one with the album and one with two extra tracks
• Recording tape belly band applied (This is a piece of a Radiohead ½ inch master tape from an actual recording session. The tape degrades over time and becomes unplayable. We thought rather than it ending up as landfill we would cut it up and make it useful as a part of the special edition. A new life for some obsolete technology… Each loop contains about ¾ of a second of audio – which could be from any era in the band’s recording past going back to Kid A. You may have silence, you may have coloured leader tape, you may have a chorus… It’s a crapshoot. We have copies. Don’t worry.)