Album of the Week | The Smile: Wall of Eyes

Supergroups come and then, almost immediately, they go. Like The Traveling Wilburys or Blind Faith, these bands are usually a fraught, experimental lark—and a rather short-lived one at that. Seldom does this alchemy result in artwork worth hanging onto, but when it does, the group subsumes the original nuclei and mutates into a new element, indefinitely. So when The Smile announced Wall of Eyes, their second album in under two years, I’m sure a mass hysteria circulated among zealots within the r/radiohead community. Radiohead hasn’t released a new album in eight years, and only two over the last 13—and for many purist fans, this “side-project” seemingly becoming the main act is no cause for celebration; it’s a sign to start prepping for doomsday.

But The Smile isn’t all that different. With 40% of Radiohead (Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood) and 25% of Sons of Kemet (Tom Skinner), it’s just a mixing of new ingredients into a memorized recipe; more sugar, less salt. Like how Crosby, Stills and Nash tacked on “& Young,” Greenwood and Yorke more or less added “& Skinner.” One is not replacing the other, it’s simply an addendum within Radiohead’s already iconic constitution. This divergence allows them to side-step the behemoth of culture shifting precedents that surround Radiohead’s legacy, not to mention their highly critical and expectant cult following. The Smile allows Yorke and Greenwood to transform by “danc[ing] into a new area [they] find stimulating,” adding moves to an already expert combination. In the same way Ok Computer took inspiration from Miles Davis’ record Bitches Brew, The Smile utilizes Skinner’s atypical, avant-jazz drumming to warp and jimmy-rig the confines of the Radiohead box Yorke and Greenwood seem so desperate to get out of. At the very least, this gives them some more room to grow within it.

According to Greenwood, The Smile’s conception rested on a creative urgency. Unable to gather the full Radiohead crew, he felt inpatient and artistically withheld, simply wanting to “work with Thom in lockdown.” Perhaps the dire circumstances were necessary to get the two to collaborate—outside of Radiohead—for the first time. Because of the narrow thematic scope, The Smile’s debut, A Light For Attracting Attention, is, at its core, a “pandemic record.” And of course, it obviously “sounds kinda like Radiohead.” In fact, the duo repurposed a few old Radiohead outtakes alongside writing new material. You have to start somewhere, right?

A Light For Attracting Attention harnessed the punkish haughtiness of The Bends and Hail To The Thief with outright rock tracks like “You Will Never Work In Television Again” and “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings.” It contained the traditional flickers of electronically exemplified anxiety via songs like “Speech Bubbles” and “Open The Floodgates,” but still brought about a newness most distinctly from Skinner’s unconventional time signatures and sporadic rhythms. It was a careful, considerate variation. Familiar, but still novel; a slight shuffle in a different direction but not quite a full step.

Wall of Eyes, on the other hand, has a distinctive stride. Although only eight songs long, not one track on the album clocks in under five minutes. There are frequent lush, open spaces coalescing into pensive, jammy meandering. Heavy guitar and arpeggiated picking are subbed out for more string arrangements from both Greenwood and The London Contemporary Orchestra. Wall of Eyes is a sweeping, Smile-ing symphony. This could be attributed to production duties going to Sam Petts-Davies—A Moon Shaped Pool engineer and Suspiria soundtrack co-producer—rather than long-time collaborator Nigel Godrich. Like A Moon Shaped Pool and Suspiria, Wall of Eyes is moodier and more sparse, like how a tree is in the winter. The tracks are like long branches stretching out, each textured by their own idiosyncrasies, complications and sonic movements, but are still clearly part of the same root.

The eponymous first track begins with a light acoustic guitar strum. Skinner’s drumming then commences in 5/4 time, churning alongside eerie synth like a gothic samba. People are dancing and “raising a glass to what [they] don’t deserve,” while the world turns black and white around them. Yorke sits “strapped in” unable to do anything but watch as the song grows into continued discordance. All throughout Wall of Eyes, Yorke seems to be criticizing the elite’s global inaction. On “Read The Room,” anxious polyrhythmic guitars hop from left to right over marching drums that seem to reluctantly drag, like billionaires refusing to assist in the climate crisis. They “can’t be arsed for half a million” because it “takes the fun out of it.” The track then suddenly moves into a steadying post-punk beat as if to clear its throat, ahem. “Come on out, come on out, we know you’re there,” sings a petulant Yorke. “Friend of a Friend” similarly begins as a ballad, with just piano and a reflective Yorke. Strings then suddenly congeal with aerial synth creating a frenzied thrust of sound. But all that chaos blows over to reveal Yorke back at the piano asking: “All that money, where did it go?.. A friend of a friend.”

Yorke is frequently a purveyor of the eschatological. He sees plates spin and warns of their inevitable crash to the ground. He’s like if the grim reaper had Santa Claus’ job: He doesn’t collect your soul but shows you where it had been all along. He gifts you the clarity to see yourself and the misty world around you through a new pair of apocalyptic-tinted glasses. Although the ominous, but (limited) omniscient perspective of Yorke’s writing remains, Wall of Eyes feels exceptionally empirical. While A Light For Attracting Attention maintained a unity in the album’s suffering; a common bulging vein that carried blood and sent you out for it, Wall of Eyes is exclusive—but it’s conflicted by this insularity.

On “Teleharmonic,” drums steadily tumble and chant as cymbals clang like a shivering body alongside an icy synth. “Somewhere, you’ll be there,” sings Yorke. “So long in all that fire and all that ice.” Whether he chooses fire or ice, desire or hatred, it doesn’t matter. As Robert Frost implied, both routes lead to death. “I Quit” suggests a surrender to this inevitability. Tremolo guitar picking sustains against wobbling, glitched synth as he goes toward the light. “This is the end of the trip,” he asserts. Strings then play him out as he follows their lead down a “new path out of the madness to wherever it goes.”

Yorke once said, “a good piece of music requires knocking a hole in the wall so you can see out on another place you never knew existed.” It’s hard to avoid intertextuality when it comes to Thom Yorke. His musings feel in conversation with each other, whether it be in harmony or dissonance. So this record seems like an attempt to puncture a new space (i.e. the Smile itself) while still acknowledging the limit and inescapable mythology of the aforementioned box that Radiohead exists within. This journey outward crescendos with the eight-minute odyssey “Bending Hectic.” A solemn acoustic guitar sighs alongside dreamlike strings as Yorke bikes up the Italian countryside preparing for an impending crash. After four minutes of cinematic trekking, he reaches a fuzzied, heavily feedback edge. “It might be as well,” he sings, before catapulting and falling into a gained and sludged up thunderstorm—and hey, there goes Greenwood soloing on guitar! It’s all very “A Day In The Life,” but Yorke is embracing the crash of uncertainty: “Despite these slings, despite these arrows I force myself to turn.”

Everyone in Radiohead has got their irons in some fire or another. OG drummer Philip Selway went singer/songwriter; bassist and brother Colin Greenwood has been accompanying Nick Cave’s solo run; guitarist Ed O’Brien has a handful of solo albums as EOB. But The Smile is a distinctive turn within the greater Radiohead side project sphere; it’s got Greenwood and Yorke working in the same hotbed. Too much iron in one fire results in less overall heat, so you have to focus. You have to simmer one thing at a time. You’ve got to go in one direction. At the end of Wall of Eyes, it seems like Yorke is accepting of this. He’s allowing himself to take a spoon to concrete and go digging around in the direction that appeals to him at this moment. Right now, it isn’t Radiohead. You could endlessly speculate on why this is the case. Maybe it’s a “where do we even begin” kind of arresting dilemma, but this vacation away from the routine tunings of Yorke and Greenwood’s high school band might allow them to return, one day, more relaxed and tanned. Until then, I’m eager to see where the Smile goes next. So far, so, so good.

Sam Small is a freelance writer of sorts & shorts based in Brooklyn, NY. She has written for NME, Consequence of Sound, Clash Magazine and Under The Radar.