I’m tip-tap-tapping away at this on the bus home from London, where I saw Radiohead spin-off THE SMILE play at Alexandra Palace last night.1
A project birthed in 2020 as the musical equivalent of a daily lockdown walk has grown into something that feels altogether more permanent. The band’s (excellent) first album, A Light For Attracting Attention, resembled a sparse, looser version of Radiohead, but with this year’s (also excellent) second album, Wall of Eyes, and their live performances, they are revealing themselves as a different beast entirely.
Various online reviews use adjectives like “agile”, “sinewy”, and “skittish” to describe the band, which are, in fairness, pretty accurate labels (the title to this post is only half-tongue-in-cheek). Due in part to the influence of jazz drummer Tom Skinner, their songs all have a loose, informal, writhing quality, regularly switching up time signatures and mutating into extended jams, riffs and outros. This is even more noticeable live, where the production-studio sheen of their album recordings is stripped away, and moments like the groundswell of bass in the otherwise woozy Teleharmonic take on a growling, immediate quality.
Highlights include the two-parter Read the Room (one of my favourite pieces of Radiohead-adjacent music in years), a very cool extended intro leading into the jittery syncopated rhythms of A Hairdryer and the bossa-nova-tinged Wall of Eyes. The band have also dusted off and repurposed an old Thom Yorke tune, Feeling Pulled Apart By Horses, whose snarling bass feels like a pitbull plunging into your chest.
A quick note on Jonny Greenwood, who, throughout the two-hour show, must have played seven-plus instruments, including, at one point, a harp and a synthesizer simultaneously (he also played a (bass?) guitar with a violin bow.) He is, plainly, a genius (his film scores to There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice and, my favourite, You Were Never Really Here, are some of the best of the 21st century).2 Watching him do his thing is an awe-inspiring experience, even if, like me, you don’t have a clue what he’s doing for 99.9% of it.
As is Thom Yorke’s wont, there was little by way of audience interaction, although he did seem happy to be there (apparently, the night before, in Birmingham, he told the crowd to “shut the fuck up” after they didn’t stop talking during the performance 😬). Bar a couple of exceptions, the band’s songs lack the anthemic quality of Radiohead’s back catalogue, and they are primarily met more by periodic bobbing than by singing-along (thank goodness) or dancing (a shame). I’d love to see them perform again in a much smaller venue. Although the sound was pretty respectable, Alexandra Palace (which is enormous) lacks the intimacy that the complexity of the music demands.
When news of The Smile first landed, I confess to a bittersweet reaction. I feared that the band’s birth heralded Radiohead’s death. I still hope this isn’t the case, but if this is the level of inventiveness, originality and ambition we get in the meantime, then I couldn’t be more here for it.
By the time I’m publishing this, it was actually a few nights ago…
Jonny’s film scores, plus the band’s relationship with Paul Thomas Anderson, have emboldened me sufficiently to talk about them in this usually film-focused establishment.
Sounds like a good time! Glad you weren't at the Birmingham show, haha