Whereas most diversions from the high profile musical ‘day job’ by well-known musicians tend to veer towards exceedingly spontaneous and stress-free noodling or more of the same, only not backed with the musicians the fans expect and want to see and hear, this instrument-swapping team-up combining Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with jazz-rooted drummer Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet, London Brew et al) has excelled in rare musical alchemy and surprising (and surprisingly potent) expansions or twists on the templates drawn from each member’s past endeavours.
The Smile’s first outing, 2022's A Light for Attracting Attention, combined the warmly radiating substance of latter-day Radiohead gems ala In Rainbows (2007) and A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) with a restlessly throbbing rhythmic vibrancy that welded the motorik forward-momentum of Can and Neu! to the polyrhythmic splendour of Afrobeat. Released in January of this year, Wall of Eyes shelved some of its predecessors melodic richness and emotional directness in favour of delving deeper into murkily anxious abstraction. The results were more slippery and spikier, but maintained uniformly high standards thanks to a cohesive mood and a drive to indulge in compositional complexity and restlessly shifting rhythmic acrobatics which suggested that Yorke and Greenwood were positively basking in their newfound freedom from the by now ludicrously, possibly even stiflingly overblown expectations associated with the "day job".
That Cutouts is the second album from The Smile
released during 2024 is an almost unthinkably Stakhanovian 'shock
worker' feat in the context of Radiohead's sluggish rate of production
(the band's most recent album came out nearly a decade ago). Mostly
drawn from tunes cut at the same sessions that produced Wall of Eyes
(perhaps leading to the somewhat dismissive title) and bundling
together previously unreleased tunes The Smile have performed live, the
concept of Cutouts seems designed to keep expectations at a manageable level: a cupboard-clearing exercise rather than a ‘proper’ new album, an Amnesiac to Wall of Eyes’s Kid A.
Against this backdrop, Cutouts succeeds far beyond
expectations: in some ways, much of the material here is more
approachable and less forbidding than the twitchier half of Wall of Eyes.
There are odd moments that sneak towards hard-to-fathom experimentation
with form and texture (the abstractedly floating synth-saturated
mutterings of "Don't Get Me Started") and somewhat frosty workouts that
seem custom-built to demonstrate that The Smile can craft something out
of even the trickiest of time signatures. But there are also moments of
unsettling beauty ("Foreign Spies"), uncharacteristically direct slices
of majestically melancholy crooning (live highlight "Tiptoe",
interrupted by outbreaks of chattering dinner party ambience), tunes
strong enough to suggest they must have been left off previous albums
accidentally ("Instant Psalm"; complete with the kind of dramatic string
arrangement that characterised Wall of Eyes), agitated
minimalist funk excursions ("Zero Sum") and crunchily knotty post-punk
knuckle-whiteners that feel more approachable than The Smile’s past
detours to math-rocking post-punk convulsions. Best of all, the murkily
soaring “Colours Fly” feels like a not so distant relative of
Radiohead’s “National Anthem”, with the original’s pulverising groove
further amplified and pumped full of a distinctly 21st century brand of
anxious foreboding.
Many bands would be overjoyed to have accomplished an album
as solidly satisfying as this collection of offcuts. Where the
vault-clearing exercise of Cutouts leaves The Smile is unclear, however.
