the group escaped from the thigh of Radiohead flourishes with grace on its second album

On this album by the trio The Smile released Friday, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, whose side project it is, deploy their limitless inventiveness in a more peaceful and luminous climate. Sumptuous.

We’re sorry for the hardcore fans of Radiohead but The Smile, made up of the two pillars of the Oxford group Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, allied to drummer Tom Skinner of the avant-garde jazz group Sons of Kemet, resembles less and less to a parenthesis. Born during confinement, because Thom and Jonny wanted to finish a few songs together, The Smile which releases its second album on Friday January 26 Wall of Eyes, is increasingly resembling a long-term project, in which the two accomplices can experiment and flourish in complete freedom, freed from the cumbersome expectations surrounding Radiohead. Moreover, if Radiohead were to return, the group would inevitably find itself transformed, impregnated and regenerated by this escape. beautiful.

In the second round, the trio seemed to have found a form of calm. Wall of Eyes is less leaden, less desperate than the previous one, A Light For Attracting Attentionand that Radiohead’s latest album, A Moon Shaped Poolwhich dates back to 2016. Rest assured, we are far from euphoria : shadow and melancholy always hover over the compositions of Wall of Eyes, and many micro-sequences are haunted. But this time the songs seem to seek more to reach the light than to search the painful abysses.

Do we owe this inflection to producer Sam Petts-Davies, also at the helm of the mixing consoles? ? It turns out that for the first time in a long time, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood this time did without their faithful friend and producer Nigel Godrich for these eight tracks recorded at Oxford and Abbey Studios London Road. On this particularly melodious album, the London Contemporary Orchestra once again performs the marvelous string parts. For his part, drummer Tom Skinner asserts his atypical and mobile style, never demonstrative, his discretion not preventing us from realizing how his playing is decisive in the success of this alchemy.

Teeming with details beneath apparent simplicity

Guitarist and multi-instrumentalist who has become a very popular film score composer in recent years, Jonny Greenwood always cultivates dissonances, lurches and deliberate departures from the road. The complexity remains, but it has never seemed so natural, organic, effortless, despite the incredible density of details and surprises that each title contains, as on the opening track (below), a neo-bossa nova with a very simple motif behind which many dilapidated and threatening sounds swarm in the background. Above all, inventiveness and imagination are present at every moment, so that it is simply impossible to get bored despite songs that are all more than five minutes.

As we saw on stage during the tour of The Smile in 2022, Thom Yorke is no longer just this skinned soul, this singer with a fragile and plaintive voice in the high notes. Without losing any of his vulnerability, he broadens his possibilities, tries things and varies styles. It goes down into the bass on I Quit and on Bending Hecticone of the highlights of the album – a majestic track started as an ample ballad, which ends in powerful post-punk fireworks –, and use on Read The Room with astonishing phrasing like Perry Farrell (Jane’s Addiction, Porno for Pyros). Friend of a Friend is another gem in two parts whose progression and piano chords this time clearly look towards the Beatles, and in particular A Day in the Life.

Concerning the texts, except Bending Hectic which evokes a car accident in the perilous bends of the Italian mountains, we are always lost in conjectures about what Thom Yorke wanted to express. Criticism of the inaction of the ultra-rich perceived on Wall of Eyes seems to permeate a good part of the metaphors of the record. No certainty though. Thom Yorke himself explained in 2019 in the New York Times : “I usually throw away the text when I understand what it means – it’s too flat. The lyrics should be a series of opening windows rather than closing them, which is incredibly hard to do.” From one training to another, this is something that does not change. Radiohead fans, stop moaning. And smile.

The Smile will give from the 7th March in Dublin the kick-off of a European tour of around forty dates which will pass through Brussels on the 15th March and will for the moment only make one stop in France, on Sunday 25 August in Rock en Seine (Paris). Techno producer James Holden will be the opening act for the entire tour.

The album “Wall of Eyes” by The Smile (XL Recordings) was released Friday 26 January 2024