Not since 1998, when Oasis delivered Be Here Now, their feverishly anticipated sequel to What’s the Story (Morning Glory), has a rock album generated as much heat ahead of its release as Radiohead’s In Rainbows.
The fuss over the past week has centred on the band’s decision to offer it, in the first instance, as an MP3 download from their own website, for which fans can choose to pay whatever they like. But this was only the last drama in a saga which has rumbled on for the best part of three years. Out of contract with their old label Parlophone in 2003 after finishing Hail to the Thief, and with only themselves to please, Radiohead have dallied over In Rainbows like no other record in their 16-year career.
On the face of it, this is not good news. Extended, unsupervised periods in the recording studio are notoriously bad for rock bands and tend to result in overblown stillborns like Fleetwood Mac’s cocaine opus, Tusk, and the inconsequential doodlings which dominated the Stone Roses’ sadly mistitled Second Coming.
But in Radiohead’s case, the delays and the false starts have had a happy ending. Maybe it was a good thing, in retrospect, that Jonny Greenwood, who was appointed the BBC Concert Orchestra’s composer in residence in 2004, was distracted by his first commission, Popcorn Superhet Receiver, when the band began work on their seventh album in early 2005. Thom Yorke’s abrupt departure later that year to work on a solo album clearly didn’t do any harm, either. Perhaps it was the very fact that their two most restlessly experimental members have been able to let off steam away from Radiohead that meant that when the band finally reconvened last year, they set about recording their most straightforwardly enjoyable album since OK Computer.
Here, back at last, is the magic ingredient that has been lacking, or at least hiding, on Radiohead records ever since a highly disgruntled Thom Yorke came off the road, exhausted, in 1999 and announced that he had “had it with melody”. What a sad day that was, coming from the man who dreamt up Fake Plastic Trees and Karma Police, to name but two of the sublimely original tunes that turned Radiohead into a much-loved, multi-million-selling global draw. Say what you like about Kid A, Amnesiac and Hail to the Thief – and there is much that can be said, for and against – none of the group’s 21st-century offerings boasts a melody that can hold a candle, let alone a lofted cigarette lighter, to the best of Radiohead in the 1990s.
Though In Rainbows puts that to rights, it takes its time to show its full hand. The opening track, 15 Step, finds Yorke doing his impersonation of a ghostly choirboy over a mildly autistic, Kid A-flavoured, hip-hop beat. Bodysnatchers continues in a vein familiar to fans of the band’s recent work, with a fuzzed guitar riff having a fight with a competing time signature from the rhythm section, while Yorke wails over the top. But everything changes with track three, Nude, which sounds like a classic old soul ballad with some slightly strange sonic edges. This reminds you instantly of the widescreen, emotionally coloured splendour that Radiohead used to evoke on a regular basis, before the urge to unsettle listeners usurped the desire to offer them something more cathartic.
In Rainbows doesn’t really put a foot wrong from them on in. The band can’t resist a dash of dissonance and random distortion here and there, but then again, they wouldn’t still be Radiohead if they had edited that out of the mix; and for every nod to weirdness for its own sake there’s a string arrangement that’s more up George Martin’s street than Messaien’s.
Likewise, a few of Thom Yorke’s lines still retain that truculently tetchy, undergraduate air, particularly when he starts bemoaning the “collapsing infrastructure” on House of Cards; but Yorke has never written a more direct love song than the bell-strewn All I Need, or penned a catchier singalong anthem than Jigsaw Falling into Place.

Radiohead aren’t obviously trying to reclaim ground they surrendered after their world conquest with OK Computer: their guitar arrangements here tend to favour acoustic strums and delicate arpeggios rather than the thunderous twang of old. They’ve done epic, for the time being anyway. For all that, their seventh album sits far closer to their third than it does to their sixth. With a less conventional outfit, you would have to call In Rainbows a return to form. With Radiohead, it feels more like the band have finally solved a problem that only they would ever have thought needed solving in the first place.

To get ‘In Rainbows’, go to www.inrainbows.com and choose how much you want to pay. You will be sent an activation code by email, which you can use to download the album. A standard CD will be released in January next year.