Yorke, Greenwood and Skinner match Radiohead for challenges, surprises and beauty
Were Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood to insist that both The Smile’s debut album, 2022’s A Light For Attracting Attention, and this surprisingly expeditious follow-up were the direct successors to Radiohead’s last broadcast, 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, it’s doubtful many would query them. After all, despite Ed O’Brien, Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway’s vital contributions to the quintet’s long-term success, Yorke and the younger Greenwood have long been Radiohead’s dominant forces. Creatively, they’re so idiosyncratic – especially with drummer Tom Skinner’s role here so discreet, if unquestionably intricate – that common ground between The Smile and Radiohead is inevitable.
NEIL YOUNG IS ON THE COVER OF THE NEW UNCUT – HAVE A COPY SENT STRAIGHT TO YOUR HOME
As much as we anticipate reinvention when musicians adopt an alias, this isn’t why The Smile exists. Greenwood, simply put, was writing prolifically during the pandemic, and since not all of Radiohead were available while Skinner was – he’d already worked with Greenwood on his 2012 score to The Master – the trio teamed up to see where things might lead. Consequently, ‘Kid B’ exhibits little interest in distinguishing itself from ‘Kid A’: both bands trade in warped melodies, tricksy time signatures, unfamiliar structures, and unpredictable, inspired tangents, albeit rarely so much they appear intellectually aloof. They even dress in matching clothes, with Stanley Donwood and Yorke handling the artwork for each.
Sure, each band sounds a little different, with The Smile arguably more spontaneous, occasionally a smidge more post-punk, a tad sparser and sometimes a bit rawer, especially on this second album. That’s perhaps thanks to Nigel Godrich’s replacement as producer by Sam Petts-Davis, Yorke’s Suspiria co-producer, but development is what we’ve come to expect from Radiohead too: a group that’s always changing, always adapting, playing to their present strengths. No wonder it’s so hard to tell the two of them apart. The Smile’s cheerful choice of nom de plume was less a declaration of intent than a practical way of acknowledging a new constellation.
Of course, it makes commercial sense to blur the bands’ identities too, casting The Smile less as spinoff than regeneration, like a new Doctor Who, emerging from the same gene pool with equal gravitas. It makes artistic sense as well, allowing them to fill the space left by Radiohead’s absence while exploiting that global brand’s freedoms. Certainly, none of the grand fanfares or bittersweet symphonies usually preceding the return of megastars heralded Wall Of Eyes, which was largely written on tour. Instead, it was introduced by the breathtakingly arranged “Bending Hectic”, eight minutes of hushed vocals and tortured guitar strings, smoothed early on by featherlight violins which ultimately catapult filthy, doom metal chords into the mix.
Wall Of Eyes begins, too, not with a crowd-pleasing anthem but a finespun, chiefly acoustic title track whose initial impressionistic smudge only lifts, like a ghostly mist, upon repeated plays. Even when additional effects edge in and sky-scraping strings descend, their influence is more eerie than reassuring. A 5/4-time signature, despite its samba feel, is bookish too – in contrast to the brattish 5/4 of “You’ll Never Work In Television Again” (from A Light For Attracting Attention), or In Rainbow’s mesmeric, cantering “15 Step” – and, as the song begins disintegrating around him, Yorke counts each beat aloud. Still, both are in keeping with Wall Of Eyes’ character, which revels in that welcome but vanishing concept, the album as an entity of its own. This is, in essence, world-building music, with its stylistic breadth and dignified restraint remarkable.
Not that there aren’t moments of relative abandon. Somewhat gentler than “Bending Hectic”’s violent coda, “Read The Room” opens with intertwined, sinewy guitar lines, Yorke wailing like a peevish child over a hiccupping rhythm before a left turn into post-rock riffage and, later, early Verve-like shoegazing. “Under Our Pillows” begins with further spiky guitars and another 5/4 rhythm, though a brief stretch of meandering Pink Floyd psychedelia accelerates into a motorik dreamscape, while “Friend Of A Friend” – yet again in 5/4 – hastens to its conclusion, despite otherwise resembling “Pyramid Song”, with “A Day In The Life” orchestral squall.
Even that is hardly rampant, while the atmosphere elsewhere is pensively spellbinding. “I Quit” bleeds into a shimmering mirage with percussive tics, shards of synths and lush strings that couldn’t be less like Greenwood’s hero, Krzysztof Penderecki’s, and “You Know Me!” boasts Yorke’s fine falsetto over muffled piano chords quickly caught on a crepuscular breeze of hazy strings. Even “Teleharmonic”, the only true curveball, is a desolate, shivering electro-soul-barer, Yorke’s early murmur slurring “payback” into “baby”. Astonishingly, before long he’s hollering like Marvin Gaye in wordless ecstasy, with pastoral pipes, shimmering cymbals and rumbling synths bringing things to a blissful close.
Few artists are able to reach the stage where their fans trust them implicitly without soon becoming creatively complacent. Fewer still seem satisfied with that audience, instead scrabbling around desperately for greater relevance, with often the opposite result. But The Smile take Radiohead’s privileges seriously, rewarding our attention with music that demands and – crucially – holds it. No frills, no distractions. A little like Radiohead, then; but there’s nothing wrong with that.