The Smile: Better Than Radiohead?

The brilliant new album Wall of Eyes certainly makes the case

January 25, 2024January 25, 2024 Ted Miller 1 Comment 2024, A Light For Attracting Attention, A Moon Shaped Pool, In Rainbows, Jonny Greenwood, King of Limbs, Radiohead, The Smile, Thom Yorke, Tom Skinner, Wall of Eyes, XL Recordings

Phil Selway, Colin Greenwood, Ed O’Brien. Who needs ‘em?

I’m being mean and ridiculous. But the numbers are also damning. Jonny Greenwood and Thom Yorke, the two most distinguished members of Radiohead, one of the only Only Bands That Matter to still exist (or matter, but have fun with the next 1975 album), have made two albums with Tom Skinner in less than two years. That’s almost as many as Radiohead have made in the last 17 years combined, depending on whether or not you agree The King of Limbs earned the full weight of an album qualitatively (I think it’s underrated but most fans don’t) or quantitatively (few people consider a 37-minute record to be merely an EP in 2024 but it sure was treated like one).

One of those three Radiohead albums was widely agreed to be illmatic: In Rainbows. Limbs and their slowest, most stoic work to date, A Moon Shaped Pool, are for the converted only. Now don’t get me wrong, The Smile’s 2022 debut A Light for Attracting Attention and the new Wall of Eyes are nowhere near as accessible as, say, “High and Dry” or “Karma Police” or even “Idioteque.” But they’re the most wide-ranging, dynamic, multicolored releases Yorke and Greenwood have put their names to in at least two decades. You don’t have to agree The Smile is better than or as good as Radiohead. But you can’t deny they’re fitter, happier, more productive.

It’s especially astounding what kind of dense and vivacious sounds they’re getting out of essentially just a power trio. Skinner, the powerhouse drummer formerly behind Sons of Kemet, was permitted to steal the show on Attention, via Questlove-style funk on “The Smoke” and “The Opposite,” relentlessly clean hi-hat killing on “A Hairdryer,” and rocking out for the long-suffering “Electioneering” fans on “You Will Never Work in Television Again.”

I’m gonna go for broke and say that while Jonny Greenwood’s been widely considered a hero of guitar playing, delicate arrangements, haunting film scores, etc. for a long time, his direct hand-to-string chops as a player haven’t been this audible since “Paranoid Android.” The strange tapping technique he employs on “Under Our Pillows” and the debut’s live-wire “Thin Thing” sounds like nobody else past or present. Radiohead may have sang “the raindrops / the raindrops / the raindrops” ad infinitum but the pointillist attack of how Greenwood strikes his instrument evokes precipitation in dimensions unheard among forms pop or otherwise.

Here’s another funny thing: of the three participants in The Smile, Thom Yorke is probably the most ordinary. Especially on Wall of Eyes, he adds gray shadowing sighs and textures to these compositions but he’s hardly the star. On a song like “Friend of a Friend,” even when Yorke’s got an out-front mournful-McCartney falsetto dominating the mix, it’s Skinner, who’s far more muted this time out, that still catches the ear with his tumbling, incongruent jazz fills which Yorke adeptly but discreetly rides through every ripple. The interplay in this band is the “star.”

The Smile Wall of Eyes, XL Recordings 2024

Which makes them inarguably prog-rock: Emerson, Yorke and Skinner. But because these are also the preeminent rock-splunkers of the millennium putting us through their paces, they know not just technique but grace, negative space, electrifying dynamics that don’t show off at the expense of the music. In fact, The Smile’s greatest contribution to the current state of anything is how navigably they bend pop without breaking it. This is literal on “Bending Hectic,” the eight-minute “single” that seesaws between Greenwood’s ascendant hyperpicking and slo-mo string-strangling while Skinner pitter-pats his breakables. I’d be the first to admit that a post-rock How It Feels to Be Something On isn’t quite tantalizing on paper. But in virtuoso hands, I’d even entrust these eggheads with Deafheavenly doom metal, which the song flirts with in its final moments. I wouldn’t have clamored for their stab at bossa nova either, but there’s “Wall of Eyes” in its quietly surprising glory, opening the album with its most modest song, set to a choppy, Caetano Veloso thrum.

Yorke and Greenwood are more than adept at a personal favorite trick of mine, making the programmed sound physically performed and vice versa. Blurring the lines between AI and us was one of Radiohead’s specialties thematically and musically, especially during their most vaunted era. On “I Quit,” either via Greenwood’s sleight of hand or artificially sequenced programming, the entire song is filtered through a tremolo effect, not just a guitar but even the pick sliding off the frets creating what sounds like a looped squeaking effect. I can’t condense this paragraph into a headline that will entice non-nerds. This is merely an album of advanced sound effects from extraordinary players tweaking whatever ghosts in the machine that they can.

But isn’t that what all prog should be? Sustained showing off that never stops juggling the apples or balancing the plates? These pieces are tricky but they don’t feel any denser than they have to be. In short, the Smile’s necessity is in performing extraordinary Radiohead fan service. A Moon Shaped Pool too drab? The King of Limbs too skeletal? Rock and roll dynamics too increasingly tacked-on if there at all? I’m not trying to blame Radiohead’s great rhythm section for these maneuvers toward cultier, narrower music.

VIDEO: The Smile “Friend Of A Friend”

It doesn’t much matter why Radiohead doesn’t want to do this stuff, because Yorke and Greenwood now have The Smile to sate their whims. My guess is that they’re a best-case scenario for a midlife crisis, that Tom Skinner has reminded these two historic rock virtuosos what they love about all these other styles they either left behind or never tried. The Smile just do so many things, open up so many worlds in Yorke and Greenwood’s graying toolbox that seemed so easily pigeonholed for more than a decade, that we now have conclusive evidence they do like to put songs of different tempos and dynamics all on the same record. They’ll rock, roll, fast or slow, sweet or sour, pair unlikely new sound with unlikelier juxtaposition. Just trying to describe these songs is half the fun: Is “Read the Room” a haunted march or psychedelic noise-oompah? While landing warmer than Black MIDI to boot?

It’s mind-blowing that their name isn’t ironic. The Smile. Prog as pleasant surprise. Bag of tricks. Reinventing the wheel by photographing it from different angles and warping the frame with cool effects. Or simply painting with new colors after a decade and a half of claustrophobic grayscale. Don’t worry, they’re still plenty dystopian. But they didn’t forget the stylish part of sci-fi: futuristic landscape design for all that world-ending to take place against, just like in the movies. Yorke and Greenwood like to soundtrack those, too. A screen is projected on a wall and eyes are projected on it, too. But Wall of Eyes is all ears.