It’s hard to put a label on the kind of music of music Radiohead plays. They’ve played Brit-pop, they’ve played dystopian guitar rock, they’ve played electronic.

Now it will be hard to put any sort of label on them.

Radiohead is reinventing the artist-music label relationship by removing the label completely.

The British experimental rock band (or whatever you’d like to call it) completed its six-album contract with EMI with 2003’s ‘Hail to the Thief.’

When they finished their new album last month, their Web site, Radiohead.com, said that listeners may have to wait until next spring as they decide what to do with it. The band’s creative solution means that fans can enjoy the album much earlier.

Their seventh album, ‘In Rainbows,’ will be available directly from Radiohead.com as an online download on Oct. 10. It will come out as an actual CD in December.

In an age of illegal downloads and leaked albums, Radiohead offers a downloaded version of the album at whatever price listeners think it’s worth.

Seriously: You enter a price, and that’s how much you pay for it.

It even works with an entry of zero dollars, undermining any advantage that album thieves might have.

The album’s Web site, inrainbows.com, is a trippy series of colorful pixilated backgrounds and succinct explanations of how to get your hands on a copy, digital or otherwise.

While fans wait until Oct. 10, some of the new material is currently available as live tracks from their 2006-07 worldwide tour, during which they were still writing the songs.

The general character of the new album is hard to discern from the available songs, but the sound is unmistakably Radiohead.

’15 Step’ is one of the catchier songs, starting with a drumbeat that the audience mimics by clapping, and then comes in the confident voice of frontman Thom Yorke. After the first verse, the guitar jumps in with a repeating guitar lick reminiscent of ‘Paranoid Android.’ As the album’s first song, it will help listeners reacclimatize to the band’s unique mix of strong musical talent and creative digital effects.

The album’s third song, ‘Nude,’ is softer and at a bit of a slower tempo, as Yorke returns to the slow wails that characterized ‘The Bends,’ Radiohead’s second album. It’s nice to see the contrast between this and ’15 Step,’ to show that the album will be varied, not stuck on one side of the spectrum.

‘Weird Fishes/Arpeggi’ is possibly different from the live version, when it was only known as ‘Arpeggi.’ It’s more likely that it’s a new title, since the chorus is ‘weird fishes/weird fishes/hit the bottom/hit the bottom and escape.’ The ‘Arpeggi’ comes from the arpeggio style of guitarist Johnny Greenwood’s picking technique throughout the song.

There are also live versions of ‘Bodysnatchers,’ ‘House of Cards,’ ‘Videotape’ and others floating around online, but for an album like this, it’s worth it to forgo the poor quality of live recordings and wait for their studio mix.

After all, it’s free.

Published on October 1, 2007 at 12:00 pm