The most fervent British pop music has always drawn much of its impetus from kicking against the musical conventions of its day. Everything from punk to rave culture has evolved through a succession of musical and philosophical stand-offs between those who get it and those who don’t.

But Radiohead have taken the outsider concept to new extremes with Hail to the Thief, an album of dark, existential laments which draws the starkest of battle lines. Ranged on one side of the divide is a gaggle of high-minded alt.rock musicians, critics, students, their lecturers, the progressive art elite, media sophisticates and dabblers in the avant garde.

On the other side stands anyone who simply wants to hear a good tune.

Actually, there are good tunes on Hail to the Thief. The opening track, 2 + 2 = 5 (The Lukewarm), echoes the cascading melodies and chord sequences that were a staple of the band’s populist masterpiece, OK Computer. And there is even a single, There There (The Boney King of Nowhere), in which Thom Yorke’s plaintive vocal surfs across a beguiling guitar riff with a majestic sense of freedom and purpose.

Meanwhile, the group themselves have generated a lot of upbeat spin about the supposed accessibility of this album. “This is a pop record,” Yorke has declared. “It’s really direct. I’d love to know that it’s on the radio.”

Well, these and maybe one or two other tracks may find their way on to the evening schedules, but put this joyless album on at the average dinner party or teen disco, or indeed virtually any sort of social gathering, and it will stop the proceedings dead in their tracks.

The fact is that Radiohead have now spent so many years engaged in a quest to discover whatever musical forms may exist on the furthest extremes of the modern rock universe that they have become marooned in deep space. Despite mounting an attempt, with this album, to return to the mothership where they might rediscover their ability to write appealing songs, they now find themselves unable to do so. And if, as Yorke told NME, they really believe that this is a “sparkly, shiny pop record, clear and pretty”, then they are even further gone than I had imagined.

Hail to the Thief may be one of the “cleverest” and most intellectually evolved pop albums ever released, but it is also depressing, bleak, introverted and deeply pretentious (all those subtitles, so echt, don’t you think?).

The production, by Nigel Godrich, is fractured and incomplete-sounding. Tracks such as Sit Down. Stand Up. (Snakes And Ladders) are guided by naff Casio drum machine beats or else, in the case of Backdrifts (Honeymoon is Over), left to drift around in a soup of swirling electronica.

When a song does start to assume a more coherent shape, attention is inexorably drawn to the repulsive imagery of the lyrics. “Are you hungry/ Are you sick?/ Are you fracturing?/ Are you torn at the seams?” Yorke sings in We Suck Young Blood (Your Time is Up), an unholy mixture of Brechtian ballad and vampiric funeral march.

Myxomatosis (Judge, Jury & Executioner), a strange, jazz-electronica number with a twitchy, funk drumbeat, conjures a mood far blacker than the blackest death-metal album. “Buried in a burning black hole in Devon/ I don’t know why I feel so skinned alive,” Yorke sings, the imagery being all the more potent thanks to the lucid, unwavering tone of his voice. Shout these words out against a wall of power guitar chords and it would sound comical.

Radiohead’s pathological insistence on seeking out a path that remains untrodden no matter how inhospitable the route, while giving vent to a slate of emotions dominated by such unbridled extremes of fear and loathing, has resulted in an album which is essentially one-dimensional and monochromatic.

Ironically, despite all their bold conceits, Radiohead are now preaching entirely to the converted. As far as the rest of the world is concerned, they still have a lot of explaining to do.

Key track

Located at the heart of the album, both physically (track eight out of 14) and philosophically, The Gloaming (Softly Open Our Mouths in the Cold) is a nightmarish agglomoration of electronic sounds and words that races along like an uncomfortably raised heartbeat. Musically, there are echoes of dance/electronica acts such as Underworld and Röyskopp, while the atmosphere of gathering paranoia is reminiscent of Tricky.

Yorke sings in the most sinister of his choirboy voices while a horrible crackling sound, like a swarm of insects frying on a strip of neon, hovers at the edge of the mix. You would be hard pushed to find such a sense of menace on any other mainstream rock album — unless it was by Radiohead.

(Parlophone)

Explore Music

• Proms

• Festivals

• CD Reviews

• Live Reviews

Editor's choice

• Tom Cruise: 25 things you may or may not know
• Uma's pulp (non-)fiction
• The top 10 fan versus band scuffles