Now that the music industry’s future has finally arrived, perhaps fans will take a moment to decide whether or not they like it. Give Radiohead its credit, though: At a time when the record industry is singing the blues, the English rock band got people excitedly talking about an album release.

In an unprecedented move for a group of its stature, Radiohead has released its seventh album, “In Rainbows,” as a pay-what-you-want digital download from its Web site this week. Let’s not forget to see the forest through the fake plastic trees, though: Strip away the delivery system, the technological specifics, the speculation about the future of the music business, how much people paid, and other such peripheral particulars that surround “In Rainbows,” and what’s left is just another Radiohead album — arguably the band’s most woozy and amorphous release to date.

You’d be excused for getting lost in the surrounding chatter, though. As nearly every music magazine and Web site — and more than a few technology and business publications and pundits, too — have reported, the customer-settingthe-price transaction is a first for a major artist. The English daily online music digest Record of the Day even created a site devoted to this fact: “What Price did You Choose?” (www.whatpricedidyouchoose.com), where fans can enter the price they paid for “In Rainbows.” The site promises to publish its results at the end of October. People who pre-ordered the album received an all-caps email stating “The link below is your unique download activation code” with an embedded link to “a 48.4mb zip file containing 10 x 160kbps drm free mp3s.” (This reviewer paid 5 British pounds, just over $10, the average cost of other recent online mail-order album purchases.)

To people who grew up flocking to record stores the day of new releases, clicking on a link in the body of an e-mail to download a zipped file package feels more than a tad anticlimatic. No cover art, no liner notes or lyrics sheets, not even a cool piece of CD plastic with some wiggy art on its top side. No, once unzipped, “In Rainbows” becomes a desktop folder with 10 tracks in it (many fans have already complained about the 160kps bit-rate, which determines the quality of the recording).

Once played, however, everything about the delivery system becomes moot. From the cracked opening rhythms of “15 Steps” to the closing plaintive piano ballad “Videotape,” “In Rainbows” sounds unmistakably like a Radiohead album. The band’s love affair with forward-looking electronic music continues, here showing up in the fragmented beats of “15 Steps,” the colliding sheets of textural synthesizers of “All I Need,” and the rubbery bass squishes of “Reckoner” that sound like footsteps through shallow pools of gelatin. Big crunch guitars poke through here and there; gentle, ruminative piano lullabies show up more often. And throughout, Thom Yorke’s falsetto swims over melodies and crenellated rhythms like a disembodied soul searching for a home.

Mr. Yorke’s vocals, typically one of the band’s sonic anchors, are problematic here. On almost every track, he resorts to singing through various effects — delays, reverb, and processors — that abstract his already ethereal singing and don’t do the band many favors. Love it or loathe it, Mr. Yorke’s imperfect, slightly crackling tenor normally injects a fragile, human element to Radiohead’s conflicted music about contemporary alienation. Since 1997’s “OK Computer,” Radiohead has found ways to make music that marries technophile savvy with paranoid technophobia. “In Rainbows” blurs Mr. Yorke’s voice into the mechanized realm as well, making some of his lyrics sound like just another textural element. The results often feel like the love child of Gary Numan and Sigur Ros.

It’s an offspring that sounds much better on paper than through speakers — especially when the music isn’t trying anything new. “Bodysnatchers” is the album’s customary anthem, riding a gnarled distorted guitar line that subtly evokes the Beatles “Tomorrow Never Knows” over a staccato electronic beat and Mr. Yorke’s familiar disaffection: “I have no idea what I am talking about / I’m trapped in this body and can’t get out.” “Faust Arp” drapes Johnny Greenwood’s pretty guitar patterns over swaying keyboard seas and Mr. Yorke’s sotto voce lyrics about disorientation.

“Reckoner” and “House of Cards” are the best songs here, if only because they’re the most atypical Radiohead songs. “Reckoner” threads its syncopated, mid-tempo electronic rhythms into a threadbare guitar and keyboard melody, and Mr. Yorke’s voice, unprocessed for once, sings a fairly straightforward song about separating. “House of Cards” finds a place for looped guitar strums, a simple meter, and spectral harmonized “ooohs” to haunt a casual ballad about taking a romantic chance.

The other piano ballads, the sort of thinking-man’s yacht rock that Radiohead made safe for alternative radio, are the weakest songs on the album. “All I Need” is a narcotized Massive Attack love song without the agonizing sexual tension. And album closer “Videotape” is one of the band’s truly egregious missteps, a misanthropic afterlife meditation that’s not only melodically and rhythmically stillborn, but goes on for nearly five minutes feeling like a broken machine that can’t turn itself off.

For a band that has based its career on pursuing the human in an increasingly virtual world, “Videotape” makes it feels like it’s surrendering to the “Westworld” bots. If Radiohead is shooting for a conceptual coup, consider “In Rainbows” a home run: Leading the music industry into the distribution future with an album that thematically hands the musical reins to technology is a deliciously cruel irony. It’s just hard to imagine Radiohead being that coy. So while, yes, “In Rainbows” remains an industry event for what it may mean for how people obtain their music, for the moment the music itself is a reminder that even the next generation might sound mediocre once it gets here.