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Rock band The Smile: Tom Skinner, Jonny Greenwood, Thom Yorke (from left)

Photo: Frank Lebon

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If your own supergroup is becoming a burden, it's best to start a side project that puts less pressure on you. Like singer Thom Yorke and guitarist Jonny Greenwood, heads of the British band Radiohead. The two teamed up with jazz drummer Tom Skinner (Sons of Kemet) in 2022 to release an album under the name The Smile.

Actually a joke in itself, because the prog and avant-garde rock monster Radiohead, who had grown into a stadium monster, now stood for all sorts of things and a lot of musical seriousness, but certainly not for a relaxed smile. It must be exhausting to deliver new sensations to the demanding Radiohead fans. The band's last album was released in 2016. There will be reasons for that.

The Smile debut "A Light For Attracting Attention" could still be seen as a pleasant relaxation exercise for two musicians who already find it difficult to keep their creative juices in check: Both Greenwood and Yorke like to pass the Radiohead-free time with various solo albums. ventures, both are now sought-after soundtrack composers.

Greenwood has already been nominated for an Oscar twice, most recently for his music for the queer western “The Power of the Dog”. In 2023 he released one of the best albums of the year together with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa. Thom Yorke caused a stir with his horror film soundtrack for the "Suspiria" remake, and it has just been announced that he also wrote the music for the new film by Italian art house director Daniele Luchetti.

In between, however, after the favorable reviews and a successful tour, both found time to record another Smile album, this time not produced by Radiohead intimate Nigel Godrich, but by Sam Petts-Davies, who had previously worked with Yorke on "Suspiria". The influences of this collaboration can be heard everywhere on “Wall of Eyes”.

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Even in the lively, Beatles-esque “Friend of a Friend,” there is paranoia and the underlying unease of a horror film. Yorke sings “Don’t let them take me” or “Stop looking over our shoulder” in his otherwise opaque lyrics, as if he were an agent in a Hitchcock thriller. The title track speaks of “hollow eyes” that change from color to black and white. Psychedelic-metallic rock songs like “Read The Room” or “I Quit” are downright oppressive, but also gripping and exciting.

The highlight of the album is the eight-minute epic “Bending Hectic,” which begins as a feather-light, almost soul-sweet trip in which the protagonist roars through Italian landscapes in a “vintage soft-top from the 60s.” But then “Psycho”-like strings and crashing guitars break into the sound idyll, with a shrill crescendo that illustrates the horrific car accident that the song is heading towards.

Images from Godard's country road apocalypse "Week-End" come to mind. If it didn't sound so tasteless and much less cool than The Smile's music, this sound, condensed from jazz, kraut, folk and classic pop, would have to be called "cinematic rock".

But that sounds way too grumpy and like old man-like prog nostalgia. Much like Godard's modernist cinema satire from 1967, "Wall of Eyes" is, for all its darkness, a sardonic and humorous album. It's clear that the progressive rock sound cosmos of the 1960s and 1970s must be a constant in this genre, but The Smile's music doesn't seem yesterday, but fits in with the politically and socially tense atmosphere with its melancholic forebodings of coming catastrophes and impending misfortunes Zeitgeist.

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The Smile

Wall of Eyes

Label: XL/Beggars Group / Indigo

Label: XL/Beggars Group / Indigo

approx. €13.97

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In almost every one of the eight tracks you can also feel an unleashed and carefree joy: an imaginary mischievous smile with which the band always twists one more garland into the mix, forces another daring change of rhythm, drops in another beat here, throws in a disturbing noise, a whirring or whizzing - out of pure pleasure in the supernatural thrill, in wild irritation and causing unrest.

Nevertheless, this trio remains “tight” at all times, as they say in jazz. At all times it remains attached to that motoric groove that is part of Radiohead's DNA, like the suggestive interaction of Greenwood's nervous guitar and Yorke's plaintive, murmuring vocals. But here, also thanks to Skinner's playing, this practiced, familiar groove is given a completely new vibration. Almost better than the original!

(8.5/10)