Two things I love in my Radiohead music: piano and Jonny Greenwood strings. A Moon Shaped Pool has an abundance of both. It’s likely that I was going to love this album simply by virtue of it being a new Radiohead album (hell, I’m the crazy person who loves the tepidly received predecessor, The King of Limbs, even more than this one), but man, if those piano and especially those lush, twisty orchestral arrangements don’t just push it over the edge into the masterpiece realm that houses at least 75% of the band’s discography.

A Moon Shaped Pool is the Radiohead album that least resembles a Capital-A Album and most resembles a humble (if excellent) collection of songs since the band’s 2003 release, Hail to the Thief, and it’s that earlier album that provides the best analog to this one. Both show Radiohead taking stock of the disparate sounds from their previous albums and synthesizing them into something closer to a fusion than a true step forward: skittering electronics and alt-rock guitars for HttT, smoky textures and swelling orchestras for AMSP.

I keep harping on it, I know, but it’s Greenwood’s strings I keep coming back to: the way they become almost percussive on “Burn the Witch,” the sublime, otherworldly hues they give the ending minute of “Daydreaming,” the feeling of marching inevitability they shape in “The Numbers,” the unpredictable directions they tug the penultimate “Tinker Tailor Soldier Sailor Rich Man Poor Man Beggar Man Thief,” the way they cut out entirely for the spare reworking of the concert favorite “True Love Waits” (surely one of Radiohead’s most emotionally naked and beautiful moments). The interim between The King of Limbs and 2016 was a long one, and the few signs of studio life we got from the band were orchestral experiments, from the brass crescendo of “The Daily Mail” to the epic Bond cast-off, “Spectre.” I couldn’t be more thrilled that those experiments yielded more than just another of Radiohead’s b-side whims.

It’s great, y’all. The whole thing. So, so great.