The Smile – The Apocalypse Beyond Radiohead's Labyrinths

There's a line in the Ted Hughes poem of the same name from which Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood borrowed the name for this three-headed creature: "It's not the smile of a happy man, it's the smile of a man who lies to you every day." That single, chilling image condenses the entire poetics, conceptual scaffolding and expressive urgency of The Smile, a project born in the suffocating silence of the pandemic lockdowns and transformed, over the course of three titanic albums, into the most vital, neurotic and hallucinated reincarnation of the split soul of Radiohead.
To decipher this band's genetic code, one cannot ignore the looming ghost of the parent group: while the Radiohead of the last decade have gradually turned into a mammoth entity, a hyper-intellectual democracy in which every millimetric shift is the fruit of exhausting compromises and stratifications (right up to the ethereal stasis of “A Moon Shaped Pool”), The Smile represent the escape from the labyrinth. They are the unleashed Id, the animal instinct reclaiming the upper hand over the Super-Ego. With the addition of Tom Skinner – a drummer of jazz pedigree, already the polyrhythmic engine of Sons of Kemet – Yorke and Greenwood have sidestepped the quintet's conceptual infrastructure to rediscover the predatory agility of a trio. The result is an open construction site of neurosis and wonder, a musicological journey in which the emotional analysis of contemporary alienation merges with a rigorous sonic excavation, moving through math-rock frenzy, orchestral expansions and glitch-funk, all stitched together by Yorke's aching falsetto, which floats like a specter above the asymmetrical architectures built by his bandmates.

When A Light For Attracting Attention detonates in 2022, under the historic aegis of the sixth Radiohead member, Nigel Godrich, it does so with the urgency of an exposed nerve. It's a record of sharp edges and vertigo, where electricity bites back into the wires after years of ambient drift. The stylistic cues are a manifesto of intent from the very first notes: Greenwood's guitar abandons its atmospheric blankets to embrace syncopated delay once more, obsessive fingerpicking and alternate tunings, colliding with the fuzz bass lines often wielded by Yorke himself, in a counterpoint that owes as much to the kraut-rock of Can as to the afrobeat of Fela Kuti. This total immersion in groove fully materializes on "The Smoke", a track that steps away from guitar neurosis to be steered by a circular dub bassline and Skinner's syncopated drumming, over which Yorke conjures lyrics of purification through fire ("Set myself on fire").
But it's with the post-punk jolt of "You Will Never Work In Television Again" that the band's most instinctive, brutal genesis emerges: played in a hammering 5/4, it's a regurgitation of abrasive guitars where Yorke drops the ethereal falsetto for a raw invective against the abuse of power ("Bunga bunga or you'll never work in television again"), delivering a furious vocal urgency. Skinner doesn't just keep time here — he breaks it apart, stretches it, forcing his two bandmates to chase the groove through odd meters and displaced accents, far from the masterful metronomic precision of Phil Selway. A pure manifesto for these new math-rock architectures is "Skrting On The Surface". Built on an intricate odd meter in 11/8, the track is dominated by Greenwood's cascading fingerpicking, heightened by surgical use of delay pedals, while the lyrics fatalistically confront the fragility of existence ("When we realize that we are broken/ Nothing mends"), painting human beings as skaters on impossibly thin ice.
Within this controlled chaos, abysses of disarming acoustic and orchestral fragility emerge, moments where the mask slips and global anxiety becomes intimate confession. Such is the case with the aching "Free In The Knowledge", where over a bed of cinematic strings Yorke sings: "Free in the knowledge that one day this will end/ Free in the knowledge that everything is change". Here, the parallel with Radiohead's resigned asceticism is tangible, but there's a raw immediacy and a sense of inevitability that seeks no refuge in electronics, instead laying itself bare before the collapse of being.

But it's with the second chapter, Wall Of Eyes (2024), that Smile take their true leap into the dark, partially cutting the umbilical cord of their aesthetic to entrust themselves to the earthier, more three-dimensional production of Sam Petts-Davies. The sound expands into a panoramic vertigo, recorded at the legendary Abbey Road studios, where the math-punk claustrophobia of the debut gives way to bossa-nova mutations wrapped in a fog of creeping dread. The record is a masterclass in subtraction and tension, an ecosystem in which the string arrangements by the London Contemporary Orchestra, obsessively curated by Greenwood, are no mere embellishment but swarms of dissonant insects corroding the melody from within.
This harmonic fog reaches its absolute peak in the spectral electronics of "Teleharmonic", where Prophet synths envelop the voice while Skinner's drums fragment the rhythm with almost imperceptible polyrhythms, underpinning lyrics that read as a disillusioned testament ("Payback/ Fire and ice"). Just as unsettling, though under a different guise, is "Friend Of A Friend": the track rests on a piano with a distinctly McCartney-esque flavor that glides over a constantly shifting tempo, cradled by a sinuous bassline. Here the strings don't just accompany — they threaten, swelling into an alienating crescendo that mirrors a sharp, grotesque observation of urban alienation and social distancing ("All the window balconies/ They seem so flimsy").

The absolute peak of this descent into hell is "Bending Hectic", eight minutes of motoring, psychological epic that rewrite the coordinates of contemporary rock. The track rests on a continuous guitar glissando, a tuning that slowly slides into the void while Skinner brushes the cymbals with jazz-like lightness; it's the narration of an imminent crash, a car suicide on the Italian Alps that becomes a metaphor for total surrender to the dark forces of our time. When Yorke whispers, almost exhaling his last breath before the most deafening, most liberating guitar feedback the two have recorded since the days of "The Bends": "I'm letting go of the wheel/ It might be as well/ It might be as well/ I've got these slings/ I've got these arrows/ I'll force myself to turn", the listener is hurled against the windshield of existence, in a sonic catharsis that shatters every boundary between alternative rock and 20th-century avant-garde.

Closing out this impressive and tightly-knit trilogy is Cutouts (2024), a fraternal twin born of the same torrential Wall Of Eyes sessions, yet endowed with a diametrically opposite personality — jagged and kinetic. If the previous record was a watercolor fresco left to fade beneath acid rain, Cutouts is a neon-lit brutalist structure. It's the album where the rhythmic interplay between the three musicians reaches its paroxysm: Skinner's patterns grow even more intricate and tribal, grafted onto granular synth loops, guitars arpeggiated at unnatural speed and basslines with a mutant-funk flavor. It's a work of surgical interlocking, of sonic cutouts stitched together with the mastery of someone who commands the material so thoroughly they can afford to mock its rules. This exaltation of the trio's chemistry is sublimated on "Eyes & Mouth", a genuine jazz-punk climax where the rhythmic interlock between syncopated guitar and percussive patterns reaches maximum tension. Here, Yorke's falsetto becomes a rhythmic instrument in its own right, dissecting incommunicability within a dizzying sonic labyrinth. There's an air of surreal digital alienation, an apocalyptic groove over which Yorke unfurls lyrics steeped in bureaucratic cynicism and creeping technocracy.

On "Zero Sum", propelled by a guitar riff that seems to explode into a thousand shards of glass, Yorke spits out verdicts against the collapse of the system: "A physical bypass/ A physical bypass/ They're thinking all the ways/ To cut you down to size/ The gleaming white/ The windows of the enterprise". The falsetto turns to mockery, the polyrhythm turns into a gilded cage.

The entire narrative arc of Smile, from A Light For Attracting Attention to Cutouts, reveals itself thus not as a mere divertissement while waiting for Radiohead to wake up, but as an entity in its own right — formidable and necessary. They took the trauma of the new millennium, dissected it with the coldness of musicologists, and played it with the blood, sweat and ferocity of a rock band locked in a room, reminding us that while the world burns, we can still stare at the flames, tap our foot out of time, and finally, crack a smile.

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