Surprise! There’s nothing Thom Yorke seems to like more than releasing albums out of nowhere. His band, little-known cult favorite Radiohead, also spontaneously dropped their most recent album, 2011’s The King of Limbs. Last Friday, Yorke did it again, surprising his fans with a new solo album, Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes. And now that the honeymoon phase has worn off, the critics are beginning to weigh in: Pitchfork awards it a score of 6.3 out of 10, while the Los Angeles Times laments that it holds “few surprises” (which cuts tantalizingly close to an awful pun on the Radiohead song “No Surprises”). But after listening to Tomorrow’s Modern Boxes, the mainstream media’s collective opinion seems a little bit beside the point. Yorke isn’t interested in how his music will be received. His entire career constantly questions all conventions of how music can sound, how it can be structured, and how it can be distributed. He’s compulsively creative, and determined to experiment for the sake of it.

That said, the critics aren’t entirely wrong—Boxes feels a little hollow, and truthfully, this is because the album prioritizes sonic experimentation over crafting an album of well-written songs. Yorke may feel like he’s been there and done that. But when you’ve written albums as unified and incredible as In Rainbows, anything less than outstanding feels unsatisfying.

It’s apparent from the first listen that Boxes features far less instrumental clutter than Yorke’s earlier releases. The skittery heart palpitations of drum machines that fueled Yorke’s solo debut The Eraser have largely been replaced with clear-cut and robust beats; while Radiohead’s Kid A was all about smothering Yorke’s airy voice with electronic effects, his vocals now ring clear. Liberal use of reverb on the vocals lends Yorke’s voice a third dimension, echoing through an unseen space. This connection between music and space might call to mind Radiohead’s latest venture, an iOS app called PolyFauna. The app joins visuals of otherworldly landscapes with an ambient soundtrack, whose warbling synth fragments actually reappear throughout Yorke’s new album. If Boxes takes PolyFauna a step further, the textures of Yorke’s songs now become multidimensional landscapes. The trademark glitchiness of Yorke’s electronic palette now extends to the album’s chord progressions rather than beats or vocals; instead of a restless beat, you’re far more likely to hear a piano digitally processed to sound like it’s tripping over its own chord progression. The music itself is a shifting landscape, anchored in the humanity of Yorke’s evocative crooning.

When these moving parts click, the results do not disappoint. “Guess Again!” builds off of a straightforward piano progression towards an expressive intermingling of spacey synths and vocal reverberations. Album opener “A Brain in a Bottle” pairs stuttering synths with possibly the best beat on the record, and the vocal layering is particularly all-encompassing when heard through headphones; Yorke’s falsetto bounces back and forth between the left and right channels. The best songs on Boxes never require too much thought, regardless of the larger concept, the melodies simply aim to please. “Nose Grows Some” is almost gorgeous in its simplicity—Yorke’s vocals absolutely soar over a sparse synth melody and beat.

But tracks like “There Is No Ice (For My Drink)” have no such vocal anchor—Yorke opts for all atmosphere on these seven claustrophobic minutes. Like a man possessed by Pro Tools, Yorke slaps together incomprehensible fragments of his own voice to transform his own voice into a processed sample. Cool, yes, but not really a song. It’s moments like this that Yorke’s concept begins to overwhelm his songwriting chops, which inspires inevitable comparisons to Radiohead. Even at their most “inaccessible,” all of Radiohead’s albums are comprised of well-written songs. Just think of 2001’s Amnesiac: this album gets away with including “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors,” a trippy glitchfest without a vocal hook, because it couches the song between the transcendent “Pyramid Song” and the bombastic “You And Whose Army?” Here was an album that had license to ask listeners to reflect on its meaning—first and foremost, it put forth amazing songs. No such balance is struck on Yorke’s new album.

Boxes never pretends to be a magnum opus; that very concept would probably make the self-deprecating Yorke’s skin crawl. But man, remember how it felt like a punch in the gut the first time you heard Kid A? That’s what’s missing here: consistently strong songwriting that compels listeners to unpack the record’s deeper themes.