Over the years, Radiohead has always proven its ability to take whatever music its members are listening to and turn those influences into something entirely new. On OK Computer, the band blended the sounds of the krautrock genre, composer Krzysztof Penderecki and other musical elements. What resulted is an entirely unheard-of style – an ominous and grand sound that reflects the bleak nature of technology and the looming 21st century. On Kid A, they pulled from Aphex Twin and Autechre to create a complete subversion of a previously-established sound. More recently, on the painfully-underrated The King of Limbs, the band experimented with a sound grounded in subtlety and ambience, drawing from post-dubstep and further electronic influences.

Now here we are in 2013. Thom Yorke has an intense infatuation with DJ sets and doling out new Radiohead songs as singles. The album format seems to be of lesser importance to Yorke than it was around the time of Kid A. This shows through on AMOK, the first album from Yorke’s supergroup, Atoms for Peace. AMOK was conceived during a three-day recording binge in Los Angeles, during which members Flea, Nigel Godrich, Joey Waronker, Mauro Refosco and Yorke laid down glitchy drum beats, vocal samples and hypnotic synth patterns.

Over a two-year period, the sounds were mixed into an album that dropped Monday. As a result of its unorthodox conception, AMOK feels disjointed, like a writer tossing words on a page and mixing them around in Microsoft Word, hoping they’ll eventually turn into something meaningful. This album is experimentation without heart and soundscapes without direction.

It seems as if Yorke is combining all of his present influences into one package. Yet AMOK lacks the glitchy menace of Aphex Twin, the moody atmospherics of Burial or the spacy, multilayered sound of Flying Lotus. Yorke’s experimentation does honor to his musical influences, but it never builds off these sounds. AMOK comes off as more of a contemplative DJ set than an album with anything original to say. Simply put, this album lacks cohesion – a trait executed with mastery and grace on nearly all of Radiohead’s and Yorke’s previous albums. That being said, Atoms for Peace have a sound that never fails to be interesting.

Despite AMOK’s shortcomings as an album, it never bores.

Through their meticulous production, Nigel Godrich and Thom Yorke have created what could likely be the best headphones album of 2013. On the standout track “Ingenue,” syncopated percussion sounds like water dripping in the dark recesses of headphones. The song turns into a flawless groove as Yorke’s angelic falsetto floats smoothly atop beautifully dystopian synths and the pitter-patter of distant percussion. This song could be made of liquid.

The title track is the auditory equivalent of sitting in the dark basement of a house haunted by the ghost of Thom Yorke: sinister vocal samples float beneath a dubstep drum beat and simple piano chords.

“Default” is the closest thing to hearing spiders crawl around in your headphones; rattling, glitchy percussion shoots from one ear to the other as Yorke lulls with beautiful falsetto. “It slipped my mind / And for a time / I felt completely free.”

On “Judge, Jury and Executioner,” samples of Yorke’s reverb-heavy vocals create a cathedral of sound in the listener’s head as Yorke sings, “All bouncing voices down the echo chamber.” It’s the perfect pairing of musical experimentation and lyrical content.

On “Unless,” Yorke sings, “I couldn’t care less,” in a lethargic tone over a punctual drum beat and bloodless synth chords. Halfway through the song, everything stops and layers of Thom’s sputtering voice scatter themselves across the space inside headphones, creating an immersive wall of sound constructed entirely of the word “yeah.” This midway breakdown is interesting and sonically pleasing, but it doesn’t redeem an ultimately lifeless song.

This is often the case with AMOK. Many songs slowly unfurl themselves into moments of breathtaking beauty, but these moments feel like unsatisfying tastes of what could have been created from this project; what could have been organic and profound music gets lost in the messy, disjointed nature of experimentation. For now, AMOK is interesting enough to hold us over until the next Radiohead album.

3.5 out of 5 stars