It’s been five years since their last album, but the wait is finally over: British alternative rock band Radiohead released their long awaited ninth studio album, titled “A Moon Shaped Pool,” on May 8 through XL Recordings.

After the release of frontman Thom Yorke’s second solo album “Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes” in 2014, there was much speculation as to when the band was going to start recording a ninth album. The word came in February 2015, when long-time Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich confirmed that they were in the process of recording a new album. Most expected that the album would be complete and released in the summer of 2016.

While most Radiohead fans knew the ninth album was officially in the works, most were surprised when in late March, Radiohead sent ominous postcards to fans with lyrics to a then-unreleased song, titled “Burn the Witch,” and later wiped their website and all of their social media accounts completely empty.

After releasing several short teaser videos through their Instagram, Radiohead released the album’s first single, “Burn the Witch,” an upbeat, albeit unsettling orchestral pop piece. Two days later, they released the second single, a spacy ambient track titled, “Daydreaming.” The music video for “Daydreaming” was released simultaneously and directed by filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson.

“A Moon Shaped Pool” is eleven tracks in length and features songs written across many years in the past. This includes “Burn the Witch,” “Ful Stop,” “Identikit,” “Present Tense,” and fan favorite “True Love Waits,” a ballad which Radiohead have occasionally performed at live shows since at least 1995. Yorke debuted live performances of the tracks “The Numbers” and “Desert Island Disk” in Paris at the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2015.

The lyrics on “A Moon Shaped Pool” deal with a variety of topics. The song “Burn the Witch” has been interpreted as a criticism of mob mentality and authoritarianism, and on the track “Present Tense,” Thom Yorke wails “As my world comes crashing down; I’ll be dancing.”

I personally think that “A Moon Shaped Pool” is Radiohead’s best album since 2007’s “In Rainbows.” Despite its gloomy and depressing sound, there’s a resonance of hope that echoes from the melancholy lyrics. It’ll be hard to top “A Moon Shaped Pool” for me, and it looks like it’s going to shape out to be my album of the year for 2016.