What’s music worth? That’s the question Radiohead have been asking since 1993, when their self-hating outsider anthem “Creep” made them cringingly reluctant stars. The Oxford lads took to fame like a sailor takes to scurvy, and they’ve bonded with fans through a shared suspicion of pop pleasure and the system that sells it.

They usually express this mistrust vaguely. Radiohead don’t like grand statements — they obscure identity in pools of fractured guitars and alien electronics, the epic aloneness of Thom Yorke’s ice-prince falsetto and skeletal lyrical images (fake plastic trees, paranoid androids) that describe alienation the way an X-ray describes cancer.

But lately, Yorke’s been getting Bono-specific. Last year he called the music industry “a bunch of fucking retards,” and Radiohead’s seventh album could easily have been titled Get Thee Gone, Ye Tardos. It has been released solely through the band’s Web site for whatever price fans elected to pay. Sure, a fabulously wealthy band that sells out stadiums can afford a few thousand giveaways, especially when obsessives will happily rebuy the album in December when it’s released as a “discbox” with a bonus CD of outtakes, a vinyl In Rainbows and a hardcover book—all for the low, low price of £40, or $82. (Damn you, weak dollar!) But the stunt created a conversation on the literal value of music, letting people vote with their PayPals, as if passing a busker on the info superhighway or giving to a charity. Or a televangelist.

Like everything they’ve done this decade — from 2000’s Kid A to Yorke’s 2006 solo album, The Eraser — In Rainbows formulates a lush, sensualized ideal out of vague, layered discomfort. Yorke says it’s similar to the band’s 1997 masterwork of neurosis, OK Computer, only “more terrifying.” This chilling album seems to be primarily composed of love songs, ballads that are starving for human connection but generate all the interpersonal warmth of a GPS system.

In Rainbows is far more pensive and reflective than its predecessor, 2003’s gizmo-loaded noise storm Hail to the Thief. “Bodysnatchers” resurrects Radiohead’s ’90s incarnation as a molten-flow guitar band, and the distracted Mardi Gras groove “15 Step” emits miasmic funk heat. The rest is delicate and stark — “Faust Arp” is just acoustic guitar and strings, “Nude” moves like a halfhearted stalker. The band plays around the edges of songs, leaving Yorke to croon like an abstract angel over glacially gorgeous jazz guitar, craggy beats and bittersweet symphonics.

And Yorke reveals quite a creepy love jones. Over the dark hip-hop bed of “All I Need” he tells some lucky lady, “I am a moth who just wants to share your light/I’m just an insect trying to get out of the night.” The deceptively tender “House of Cards” is even more unnerving. Over a Velvet Underground lullaby strum, Yorke plays a suburban executive at a ’70s wife-swapping party, turning corporate-raider lingo (“the infrastructure will collapse”) into a slimy promise of conquest. Mixing pretty sounds and icky vibes is a Radiohead hallmark, but they rarely do it with such emotional clarity — these are people you might recognize or pray not to. The beautiful piano ballad “Videotape” is a suicide note committed to VHS, with a soul-sick loser eternally capturing all the things he never had the strength to say on “the most perfect day I’ve ever seen.”

Here’s where Yorke finds his idealized relationship: in the eye of a camera. On OK Computer, Radiohead made the budding romance with our e-mail/music/porn/news delivery box seem like erotic misery. Now they’re offering themselves through the computer, using it to create a community, and maybe even a revolutionary model for distribution and pricing. “It is the 21st century,” Yorke sings, “you can fight it like a dog.” But Yorke won’t. This is his time.

Download: “15 Step,” “House of Cards,” “Videotape”

VIDEO: Radiohead, "Jigsaw"