For those who haven’t seen an ABC Family rerun of You’ve Got Mail, say hello to Nora Ephron’s rom-com classic, which delights in Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks falling in love via instant message. Since they share no personal details with one another—she’s Shopgirl, he’s NY152—they unknowingly meet in person as enemies. His Barnes and Noble stand-in threatens to put her children’s bookstore out of business. They have no idea that they’re actually soulmates. What a dilemma!

Almost ahead of its time, You’ve Got Mail pokes at the existential implications of online and offline personas. The film turns 18 this year, and by this point, we’re used to filtering love and loneliness through the internet. When Ryan says she wandered into the over-30 chat-room as “a joke,” we’re already primed to suspect it was not a joke. We’ve seen Her. But You’ve Got Mail is also the product of a simpler time. As tunes like “Splish Splash” and “Rockin’ Robin” roll on the soundtrack, the film ditches any potential melancholy to force its audience into compliant, adorable fun.

With its doilies and mid-email finger waggles, You’ve Got Mail may be the most aggressively twee film of all time. At the eye of the storm is peak-era Ryan, playing children’s bookstore owner Kathleen Kelly. She bops about in Ann Taylor turtlenecks while rereading Pride and Prejudice ad infinitum (she loves that Jane Austen loves words like “thither”). She wistfully reminisces about “twirling,” a beloved childhood pastime. “I was thinking about [Joni Mitchell] tonight as I was decorating my Christmas tree,” she types to Joe while disentangling a string of “twinkle lights” (her words). Of course, Christmas is pivotal in the world of You’ve Got Mail—its culturally homogenous Upper West Side serves up a feature-length advertisement for the color beige, save for the pointed casting of Dave Chappelle as Joe’s best friend. This is a fantasy, pop-up book version of New York, and You’ve Got Mail demands that you thoughtlessly enjoy it. You can practically feel the film clamp open your eyes to Joe and Kathleen’s cutesy chemistry, drowning out all else. If that’s not your cup of tea, run far away.

None of this will prepare you for Joe’s horrifying third act antics (spoilers ahead, but you have had 18 years to watch this). After Joe and Kathleen complete their stress-free breakups (with Parker Posey and Greg Kinnear, both playing cardboard cutouts), Joe decides his best course of action would be to emotionally manipulate Kathleen through a fabricated love triangle. When Kathleen realizes he has been playing double duty as pen pal and IRL confidante, the music swells, and she gushes, “I hoped it was you!” What? Despite myself, my eyes watered, and I realized that You’ve Got Mail had destroyed me. Regardless of how you feel about saccharine cultural products, it is undeniable that this film knows how to orchestrate its desired emotional response. Sentimentality wins. Ew.

A fortuitous turning point in Spotlight begins with a close-up on a desk phone. The camera begins tracking out, revealing a team of Boston Globe reporters listening to the call, asking questions, and taking notes as the caller reveals details that dramatically widen the scope of their investigation. By the end of the scene, the group appears small within their basement office, the phone only a pinprick at the center of the screen.

This journey from close-up to wide shot exemplifies Spotlight’s depiction of investigative reporting. Based on a true story, the film follows four Boston Globe reporters (the “Spotlight” team) as they probe three decades’ worth of allegations that local Catholic priests have been sexually abusing children. Spotlight tracks their exposé as it gradually expands from whispers about one or two priests to something far larger in scale, and even institutionally concealed.

Though the Spotlight team won the Pulitzer Prize in 2002, Spotlight never glorifies their investigation. A dialogue-driven narrative with muted color palettes, it prioritizes concise storytelling over technical showboating—this is a film about journalists, after all. It may not be glamorous to watch Mike Rezendes (Mark Ruffalo) verbally spar with clerical courthouse staff to score some legal documents, but the urgency of the interaction makes it riveting. And despite the fact that Ruffalo is only one big name in a movie practically dripping with thespian cred—its roster also includes Michael Keaton, Rachel McAdams, and Stanley Tucci—Spotlight’s cast refrains from showy performances. Instead, keeping with the film’s tone, the cast members come together as an ensemble to serve the story.

By avoiding any self-importance, Spotlight escapes classification in the annual rush of Dialogue-Heavy Awards Bait. Director and co-writer Thomas McCarthy is best known for playing a pathological liar of a journalist on The Wire, so it’s logical that he deftly navigates institutional nuances. The reporters face editorial pressure to cut the investigation short, which would prevent them from conveying the full extent of the abuse, and a little hubris enters the mix when they worry the Boston Phoenix will publish first and possibly botch the story.

But journalistic concerns aside, Spotlight’s most affecting moments belong to the chilling verbal recollections of victims of abuse. Rather than a montage of flashbacks, we watch them struggle to clearly word their stories. The ultimate voicing of this repressed abuse lends Spotlight its haunting emotional impact as a study in the unseen and unsaid.

Chances are that if you want to see Crimson Peak, you’re looking for an escapist genre flick rather than a life-changing masterpiece. So outlining its strengths and weaknesses feels somewhat beside the point. Is it a good movie? No. But does that make it a waste of time? That’s less obvious.

Crimson Peak’s heart (and budget) is in its spectacle. Its weak narrative only exists to create a space for its overloaded style, which ultimately amounts to something empty. After her father’s suspiciously sudden death, a young writer (Mia Wasikowska) moves in with a dashing inventor (Tom Hiddleston) in his dilapidated estate, Crimson Peak. Wasikowska soon starts to suspect something spooky may be going on, largely because director Guillermo del Toro can’t stop himself from letting his spindly CGI ghosts out of the bag. Within three minutes of Wasikowska’s arrival, the house’s floorboards ooze blood reminiscent of Nickelodeon slime. Soon after, she spots a ghost that could be a dead ringer for Helena Bonham Carter. There is no subtlety here, only corny visual excess. Production designer Thomas E. Sanders creates a painstakingly elaborate haunted house (complete with a fully functional elevator!), but when the front doors of the mansion open to let in a gust of studio snow, the artifice becomes laughable. If the spectacle disappoints, the narrative devolves into something indescribably bad. Despite del Toro’s efforts to build suspense through fragments of hushed conversation, any suspense resolves in cliché.

That said, the comedy of Crimson Peak is kind of fun, largely due to its overqualified cast. Wasikowska is typically excellent, while Hiddleston’s characteristic warmth adds necessary pathos. But Jessica Chastain’s performance as Hiddleston’s intense, piano-playing sister steals the show (keep an ear out for her melodramatic exchange with Wasikowska about dying butterflies). The campiness Chastain brings to the role is simultaneously hilarious and magnetic, and ultimately, Crimson Peak proves campy in the same way. The ghosts may be silly, but the giggle is undeniable.

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.

A

final season for Mad Men is something of an odd conceit. Neatly tying up a narrative arc isn’t called for here–Mad Men has always been about watching characters rise and fall, lead double lives, and interact with each other, drink in hand. In fact, it’s often most rewarding to take a step back from an episode and reflect on how much characters have changed since the series began. A logical series endpoint, then, would similarly call for some distance from the characters. Or perhaps, it might just as appropriately end at any given point, implying the continuation of the diegetic world inside the show

The trajectory of the 60s is very much on showrunner Matthew Weiner’s mind in seventh season premiere “Time Zones.” While season six opened on ad man Don Draper (Jon Hamm) reading Dante’s Inferno on the beach, season seven finds Don on a moving walkway in LAX. He blankly stares straight ahead, his gray suit appearing colorless as he drifts onward against a backdrop of vibrant pastels. The image elegantly evokes Don’s path as he ages through the increasingly psychedelic decade, inescapably moving forward despite a loss of relevance to the time. One of Draper’s most memorable one-liners from earlier seasons–“move forward”–now takes on eerie and grave significance.

This is the first in a string of seven episodes comprising the first half of Mad Men’s final season. They’re pulling a Breaking Bad, so to speak, since AMC’s other critically acclaimed drama opted for a similar two-part final-season split. So, drawn-out closure is to be expected in this case. That said, “Time Zones” can feel like it is unfolding at a glacial pace, as though gratification is deliberately withheld. We come into the season with certain loose ends from season six fresh in our heads: Don seems ready to open up about his very (very…very…) checkered past while taking an involuntary leave of absence from his ad agency, Sterling Cooper; copy writer Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) seems poised to take over the creative department; everyone’s (least) favorite smarmy accounts man Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) is relocating to Sterling Cooper’s new west coast office. I, for one, urgently needed to know what would happen next with Roger Sterling (John Slattery), whose LSD odysseys have a special place in my heart.

“Time Zones” doesn’t open with one of these familiar faces. In fact, it practically ambushes us with the face of fairly unfamiliar freelancer Freddie Rumsen, who stares uncompromisingly into the camera. “Are you ready?” he asks. “Because I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something.” Pay attention we do, as he goes on to…pitch an ad for a watch? That’s a pretty anticlimactic start for an episode in which Don doesn’t seem to appear until the eight-and-a-half minute mark.

Or does he? We learn in the episode’s final minutes that Don has actually been using Freddie as a mouthpiece for ad pitches during his creative exile. In an episode so concerned with time, it’s now quite poignant that it opened with Don’s pitch for a watch commercial. But the initial tone of the season also seems to be that things are far less simple than they seem, and that deep revelations will not be spoon-fed. In keeping with this idea, it remains to be seen what this will mean for upcoming episodes.

A slow-paced, hour-long serial, Mad Men isn’t a show you can just drop in on–if you’re not caught up, prepare to binge watch. The series’ strength hinges on awareness of the characters’ journeys, and it will seem especially slow without all the rich background. And over the past couple seasons, Weiner seems to have further embraced this format: gone are the days of one-off episodes built around an ad pitch, even though those made for some of the show’s best stories. If these types of self-contained narratives are going to exist in this season, it seems like they will usually be grounded in larger emotional arcs (as in season four’s “The Suitcase” for one of my favorite examples of this type of episode, but stock up on Kleenex first). And even the emotional arcs themselves in this season, with the addition of a Los Angeles branch of Sterling Cooper, will seemingly make the show even more complex.

But filming in Los Angeles lends itself to more than just narrative complexity. Scenes in Los Angeles are vividly rendered in vibrant colors. The rejuvenating energy from filming on location is palpable. Pete, with a tan and a sweater knotted around his neck, is loving his chance to start fresh, while Don’s wife Megan (Megan Calvet) has just landed a role on an NBC pilot. She also has the best entrance in the episode, complemented by Vanilla Fudge’s killer cover of “You Keep Me Hangin’ On.”

If LA is youthful warmth, New York now seems grayscale and old-fashioned. There is a general air of despondency among the characters left here. Peggy seems the most powerless and out of place in this old order, as she has to contend with obtuse new head of the creative department Lou Avery (Allan Havey), who is nothing if not old school. Joan, played sharply as ever by Christina Hendricks, has to jump through misogynistic hoops to prove her intelligence to rotund, middle-aged men. As for Roger, who now seems to live his life from orgy to orgy, “not angry, just disappointed” has never cut quite so deeply when he realizes his daughter is clearly exhausted beyond words with his antics.

“Slow” is one way to think of Mad Men’s pacing. “Real-time” might be closer to the truth, and by that I mean it’s a lot like that jolt of surprise when you see an old photo of yourself eating a popsicle at age five. That sudden reminder of all the time that’s passed coupled with the uncanny feeling that this five-year-old is both you and…not you. A person that once existed but can never exist again. (Ignore the specifics of this example; we all know you can still dribble melty popsicle remnants down your face no matter how old you are.) In this spirit, it probably isn’t possible to evaluate Mad Men’s final season until the finale shows us the characters’ final moments.

It’s January of 1969 at this point in the series–quite literally the beginning of the end for the decade. At one point in the episode, Nixon’s inaugural address plays on television while Don, of course, drinks his night away in a bar. He is light-years away from who he was in the series pilot–the unflappable, undeniably cool head of creative at Sterling Cooper (and thankfully, Hamm in real life is now ages away from an awkward ‘90s dating show appearance that recently went viral). Kennedy’s Camelot has passed; so has the bulk of the late sixties riots and Vietnam protests. Mad Men is moving on. As for where, we’ll have to wait and see.

In the midst of an after-hours heart-to-heart in the corridors of the White House, President Walker (Michael Gill) suggests, “Let’s assume that in one of these chairs, staring at this wall, is where Truman decided to drop the bomb, and see if we feel anything.” He and his companion, the Vice President, look thoughtfully into the middle distance, trying to embody Truman’s frame of mind. The two men quickly come to the same conclusion—no, they feel nothing.

Such encapsulates the tone of the second season of Netflix’s American reboot of House of Cards. This exchange occurs moments after the Vice President—ex-Majority “Hhhwhip” Frank Underwood, played by Kevin Spacey with cutting and sinister precision—declares, “Presidents who obsess over history obsess about their place in it instead of forging it.” The idea of legacy, particularly the process of cementing one, looms cloudlike throughout the new thirteen-episode stream.

Needless to say, a number of skeletons are present in the Underwoods’ closet in the wake of the first season, and it seemed a reasonable assumption that the second season would focus on following them up. After all, Frank did murder a congressman to secure the Vice Presidency. The first season finale hints that Zoe Barnes (Kate Mara) and her fellow journalists at Slugline and the Washington Herald have the potential to expose him. The second season premiere, however, posits that this would be far too simple for a show whose hallmark is masterful storytelling. It warps this expected plot arc with a derailing shock, and within half an hour, House of Cards sends a clear message that predictions will be useless and nothing is sacred.

This also means that the writers have an opportunity to start fresh rather than engage in post-season cleanup. Season two unfolds like a clean installment rather than a heavy-handed continuation of old threads. Frank adjusts to White House work as he involves himself in political negotiations with China, and an on-air revelation pushes Claire (Robin Wright, on point as ever) to pursue new political and media projects. The beginning of the season hits somewhat like a scatter of disparate strands, thrust into the thick of new storylines and characters, but as the season develops, this becomes less overwhelming as loose ends all too quickly intertwine. It is in this context that familiar faces and threats begin to emerge from the woodwork.

In addition to this onslaught of new narrative, House of Cards sets its sights on expanding arcs beyond its core power couple. Significant storylines follow aptly-named journalist Lucas Goodwin (Sebastian Arcelus), VP chief of staff Doug Stamper (Michael Kelly), and even Freddy of BBQ ribs fame (Reg E. Cathey). With leads as magnetic as Spacey and Wright, spending time with other characters occasionally feels like an intermission from the real story—Remy’s affair with new Majority Whip Jackie Sharp certainly induces eye-rolls and glances at the clock.

The Underwoods easily remain the show’s north star, their artful one-liners and nearly unmatched strategic intellect stealing every scene. House of Cards is clearly indebted to a Shakespearean theatrical tradition, and when its leads are nothing short of impeccable, it feels frustrating when some other characters are not written or acted with similar finesse.

That said, the overall visual construction of the show certainly reflects a considerable attention to thematic detail. The backdrop of episode two is a construction zone, as Frank and Claire’s townhouse undergoes renovations to accommodate Vice Presidential security detail. A loaded setting such as this contributes to season-wide anxiety regarding change, as Frank is determined to exert the control he enjoyed as whip in his new position, right down to refusing to move into the Vice President’s residence.

As episodes pass and other characters are implicated, the impossibility of this hope becomes obvious. While Frank obsessively turned to the rowing machine in season one, he now fixates on building a small-scale model of the Battle of the Bloody Angle, an obsession of his brought on by learning that an ancestor fought and died there. Though he declares to the President that he focuses on “forging” ahead, Frank is subconsciously gripped by a preoccupation with his place in history. The directors and cinematographers from episode to episode quietly underscore this simmering tension, as Frank is often framed with portraits of various presidents, similar postures creating a visual rhyme. We see Frank’s attempt to fit into this history, and this doubling seemingly works naturally; the question becomes whether or not this position can remain stable or unchanged.

The variables are in play, and these are the ideas that House of Cards so skillfully dissects through Frank’s quest for power—a balance between strategy and luck, but one that always demands sweat and ruthlessness. The season premiere begins exploring these themes with characteristically elegant cinematography, the first scene fading in from black onto a nighttime view of a jogging path. In one uncut take, Frank and Claire continue their evening jog. They pause in the foreground, huff, share a glance, and continue onward with a nod. Season two presents that continuation.

The artwork for Warpaint’s eponymous second album suits the band’s sound. The four members of the band appear translucent and superimposed upon one another, the four musicians coming together as one entity in a trance-like haze. This is a band very aware of how to best capitalize on their distinctive sound, both a blessing and a potential red flag for a sophomore album attempt. Yet despite the bland description of “dreamy atmospherics,” there has always been something distinctively Warpaint at the heart of their output, and their second effort pushes this sentiment into fresh musical spaces.

Their itch to expand their sonic palette most obviously manifests itself in experimentations with conventions of rhythm-heavy electro, which consistently land well throughout the album. Complementary interactions of punchy drum and bass offset the unsettling lyrical content of “Disco/Very,” and “Biggy” uses a looping synth melody as a base for a robust percussive build. Production on such tracks is crisp thanks to Flood and Nigel Godrich and favors this shift in the band’s sound. While this focus on rhythm distinguishes the album as a whole, Warpaint avoids a one-note sophomore album through various mood shifts. What could have been the token bland acoustic track, “Teese” instead explores more somber atmospherics through a balance of delicacy and buoyancy. Elsewhere, a bent-string riff couples with stark drums on “CC” to create a tone reminiscent of darker Massive Attack tracks. Though vocal melodies do occasionally meander off the rails, such songwriting missteps demonstrate a willingness to occasionally miss the mark that makes it possible for the band’s sound to evolve.

Warpaint’s avoidance of playing it safe allows them to dodge the classical sophomore slump labels of “boring” or “predictable.” As a progression forward from 2010’s The Fool, Warpaint offers a reinvigorating change of pace as well as a logical next step. Beyond affirming the band’s existence, the album documents a band whose discography will consistently deliver.

Arctic Monkeys’s tongue-in-cheek streak seems to reach its zenith with their fifth album AM. Never a band to take itself too seriously, the Monkeys‘ new record boasts a “No. 1 Party Anthem,” while another song title asks, “Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?” Unfortunately, AM lacks songs with heft to balance out the levity.

AM’s mood is that of the late-night/early-morning hours, as club beats mix with post-hookup melancholia, although it focuses more on rhythm and riff than on contemplative moments. The Monkeys’ new favorite song formula—driving midtempo beat, slinky guitar, distracting falsetto harmonies—works best on the opener “Do I Wanna Know?,” but it grows stale after its seemingly endless repetition. “Arabella” or “Knee Socks” might have stood out as other highlights if the album were not already saturated with mediocre versions of songs like these. At the same time, both of these tracks do find strength in prioritizing Alex Turner’s lyrical and vocal performance, a stylistic hallmark of the Monkeys’ earlier records.

Throughout, the Monkeys’ creative drive feels tapped out: attempts to incorporate piano ballads (“No. 1 Party Anthem”) and “ooh la la” vocals (“Mad Sounds”) seem taken from a checklist of tired musical tropes. Influences are painfully obvious in parts: Josh Homme of Queens of the Stone Age has shaped the band’s sound ever since he produced their 2009 album, Humbug, but now “Fireside” practically lifts the vocal melody from Homme’s own “Leg of Lamb.” Luckily, the sun rises on the album’s night out with “I Wanna Be Yours,” a bare-bones crystal of a song. Cheesy lyrics aside, the song’s plaintive refrain creates an emotional immediacy conspicuously missing from the rest of the album.

In initialing the record AM (a move that Turner concedes is derivative of the Velvet Underground’s VU), Arctic Monkeys attempted to put a personal stamp on an album that ultimately lacks just that—personality.

It’s easy to wonder if the recent meteor blast over Russia was secretly part of Atoms for Peace’s press kit: the artwork for their debut album, AMOK, depicts similarly immense fireballs hurtling towards jagged terrain. Where a biting chill swept through the group’s singer Thom Yorke’s solo debut, The Eraser, the warmer atmosphere of his songwriting on AMOK is much more lava-like—viscous
and fluid.

While The Eraser is the product of Yorke and producer extraordinaire Nigel Godrich collaborating over laptops and studio gizmos, AMOK was created by five musical minds who value live performance (namely Yorke, Godrich, Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and percussionists whose touring credits include R.E.M. and David Byrne). Playing live is in their genetic coding—after all, Atoms for Peace first came together in order to take The Eraser out on tour. Though the band needed to strengthen the rhythmic backbone of The Eraser’s nine songs for the live setting, most songs on AMOK rush out of the gates with commanding grooves. The beats are undeniably thrilling; one can easily imagine Yorke bopping his ponytail to the bass-bumping shaker samba of “Stuck Together Pieces” or the manic hi-hat breakdown in “Unless.” At the same time, the record also demonstrates the band’s mastery of what can only be done in a studio: “Judge Jury and Executioner,” which made the rounds on the group’s 2010 set lists as a full-band guitar number, has here transformed into a haunting, ethereal track full of negative space. In this sense, the album’s sonic layers envelop and ensnare when heard through headphones, but it is not difficult to imagine tracks like “Default” evolving into concert hall behemoths. Listening to AMOK can be an intimate experience or a dance blowout, a schism whose resolution is entirely dependent on the listener’s mood.

The heart of the record is its concluding title track. Over a sweeping crescendo of airy electro-arpeggios and piano chords, we hear Yorke’s falsetto cut through the chaos: “I’m sending out choirs of angels / Tying round pieces of string / To run amok.” AMOK is undoubtedly marked by Yorke’s distinctive musical fingerprint, but the album flows with a cohesion that only additional personnel could provide. Literal running amok may be too much to expect after Yorke’s ghostly closing call to arms, but the previous 45 minutes would certainly justify such a response.