Not since Pearl Jam willfully withdrew from the spotlight in the wake of Ten’s phenomenal success have a band pared their fan base down to a core of true believers as successfully as Radiohead. And not since R.E.M., under the direction of singer Michael Stipe, made it impossible for listeners to interpret his songs has the frontman of a platinum-selling band undertaken to mask the meaning of his lyrics as blatantly as Radiohead’s diminutive Thom Yorke. It took a pair of CDs — 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac (both Capitol) — for Radiohead to accomplish these tasks, because by Y2K the band were in such heavy rotation on both MTV and mainstream alternative radio that one disc wouldn’t have sufficed. After all, despite the abstract nature of even the most skewed tracks on Kid A, it still debuted at #1 on the Billboard 200. And though fans and radio programmers alike had to struggle to find anything resembling a single on Kid B, er, Amnesiac, the second of the two discs didn’t fare much worse. Nevertheless, the two albums coupled with the dour tone of the Radiohead rockumentary Meeting People Is Easy appeared to get the point across: Thom Yorke was not interested in being a pop star, and Radiohead had no intention of unleashing a single as anthemic as "Creep" (from their 1993 Capitol debut, Pablo Honey) or as gorgeously pained as "Karma Police" (from 1997’s OK Computer) anytime soon.

Or did they? The band’s post-Amnesiac tour, documented on 2001’s I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings (Capitol), revealed that there were hooks, melodies, and even tempting little fragments of guitar rock lurking beneath the experimental laptop glitch pop of Kid A and Kid B. And Yorke’s straightforward vocal cameo on PJ Harvey’s 2000 album Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (Island) was proof that Radiohead’s mercurial frontman hadn’t forsaken the simple pleasures of pop music altogether. Perhaps Radiohead — and Yorke in particular — had just been going through a phase, and the next album would find them back on the tracks they had laid out on OK Computer and 1995’s The Bends (Capitol), two of the most pleasantly challenging rock albums of the ’90s, and two of the best British musical exports since the demise of the Smiths in terms of leading rock in a promising new direction instead of just following the latest trends from across the pond (see Bush).

The answer has arrived in the form of Hail to the Thief (Capitol), the band’s sixth studio album in 10 years. But this is a disc that — from its title on down to the instrumentation of each track — is certain to raise as many questions as it answers. And that’s one of the marks of a great album. People are already surmising that the Thief in question is George W. Bush. Yet there’s little direct evidence in the songs, the artwork, or even most of the interviews that Yorke has given that he had American politics on his mind.

There is, however, plenty of the paranoia that Yorke is famous for; it moves through the tracks of Hail to the Thief like a virus hijacking white blood cells on its way to the very heart of the disc. "It’s the Devil’s way now/There’s no way out," Yorke warns as Johnny Greenwood and Ed O’Brien prepare to thrash away at their guitars on the opening "2 + 2 = 5." And "Where I End and You Begin," a quietly ominous number built atop a busy drumbeat and shot through with echoey synth tones under which a swiftly strummed rhythm guitar nervously surfaces from time to time, is subtitled "The Sky Is Falling In."

Hail to the Thief opens with a sonic joke: the sound of a guitar being plugged into an amplifier. But it goes on for long enough that you half expect it to form the foundation of the first track. Instead, a conventional guitar arpeggio materializes, Philip Selway taps out eighth notes on his hi-hat, and Yorke’s voice, unaltered by electronic effects, leads the way toward an energetic rock number. Yet before the rockists in the audience can get too comfortable, "2 + 2 = 5" fades into the electronic drumbeat of the more abstract "Sit down. Stand up." And that’s an accurate indication of what’s to come: Hail to the Thief splits the difference between traditional guitar/bass/drum rock numbers like "2 + 2 = 5" and organic piano ballads like the melancholy "Sail to the Moon" and the laptop pop of "Backdrifts," with its pulsing beat peppered with disconnected blips and beeps. Which is to say, Radiohead have found a way to incorporate the experiments of Kid A and Kid B into their songwriting without jettisoning their pop sensibilities. In that, it’s a major triumph. And for anyone alienated by the abstractions of the last two albums, it’s also a relief.