I’ve never been in a beloved band with a near-immaculate discography, but I have to imagine that, at some point, the paralyzing pressure of making a new album—of knowing you risk bumming out fans and mucking up a perfect legacy—sucks some of the joy and spontaneity out of music-making.
In other words: I get it, this whole Smile thing. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood don’t want to spend four years obsessively laboring to complete a Radiohead album worthy of sitting next to A Moon Shaped Pool in your vinyl nook. They want to keep moving. Greenwood, the self-proclaimed “most impatient” member of Radiohead, once said he would prefer if “the records were 90 percent as good, but come out twice as often.” It’s in that spirit that the Smile, the little Radiohead spinoff that could, present their second album of 2024, cobbled together from the same sessions that produced Wall of Eyes but, like Amnesiac, too good to be dismissed as a bastard child.
Compared with its predecessor, Cutouts is looser, funkier—a thrilling testament to the near-telepathic chemistry these three musicians have honed across two years of touring. The stage is where many of these songs first premiered: the pastoral brooder “Bodies Laughing” in May 2022, a mere day after the band wrote it, and “Colours Fly” the following month in Paris, where guest musician Robert Stillman—then playing sax, now on bass clarinet—triggered the song’s ascent into squealing free-jazz delirium. Greenwood’s omnivorous curiosity is a big theme here. “Colours Fly,” with its frantic Egyptian scales, reflects Greenwood’s recent immersion in Middle Eastern music, notably as a collaborator of Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, while the pillowy synth overture that opens the record, “Foreign Spies,” repurposes elements from Greenwood’s 2019 classical piece Horror vacui.
Years ago, people snickered when Yorke formed a band with Flea, but the singer’s interest in counterbalancing his depressive tendencies with extremely sick grooves seems central to the Smile’s whole deal. He’s certainly found the guy for the job in Tom Skinner, a syncopation wizard behind the kit. Skinner anchors “Colours Fly” in an off-center 5/4 meter, underlines the burbling panic attack of “The Slip” with skittering hip-hop beats that resemble readymade sample packs, and gives us one of his most restlessly percolating grooves on the exhilarating “Eyes & Mouth,” another longtime live staple. Indeed, the only underwhelming tracks are those where Skinner is either sidelined (the aforementioned “Foreign Spies”) or reduced to thickets of auxiliary percussion (“Don’t Get Me Started”).
Greenwood, meanwhile, remains committed to his life’s work of coming up with mangled guitar riffs that no human has ever played before. The YouTube guitar-tutorial guys are going to have fun with “Zero Sum,” a frenetic workout whose guitar shredding sounds a little like Buckethead auditioning for Lightning Bolt. A brass section augments the song’s jittery funk, while Yorke’s paranoid tech-world mutterings touch upon TED Talks, MasterClass, and repetitions of “Windows 95, Windows 95.” And Greenwood’s fretboard-strangling riff on “Eyes & Mouth” may sound like a second-cousin of “Thin Thing,” but sleuthing fans have traced it all the way back to Radiohead’s 2016 tour, when Greenwood played it during the cacophonic outro of “Talk Show Host.” (The Smile is nothing if not an adoption center for neglected Radiohead song sketches.)
If Yorke is having the time of his life letting loose with the Smile, at least his lyrics remain consumed with dread. Cutouts touches on sociopolitical dread (“Foreign Spies”), late-capitalist dread (“Zero Sum”), climate-denial dread (“You're gonna bring the world down ’round your ears/While the temperature grows ugly,” he warns on “The Slip”), existential dread (“Instant Psalm”)—the works, basically.
He may not deliver a regal epic on par with Wall of Eyes’ “Bending Hectic,” but Yorke still has the ability to pull a gorgeous piano ballad out of thin air like it’s nothing, and the lush, trembling “Tiptoe” is one for the ages. “We are just baggage with no label/You will find us in the rubble,” the singer croons in communion with the gentle swells of the London Contemporary Orchestra, offering a grim prophecy that could refer to any number of world-historical crises. We’re all going to be dirt in the ground soon enough. Might as well hurry up and make another record.
