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The Smile’s New Songs, Debuted in London, Sound Like Radiohead. (That’s a Good Thing.)

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Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood premiered material at the first of three livestreamed in-the-round concerts, further revealing how their new band compares to their long history.

The Smile at Magazine London on January 29
The Smile’s Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner at Magazine London on January 29 (Wunmi Onibudo)

Radiohead side projects come and go, but the launch last May of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s new band the Smile was a rare break with custom. Although each Radiohead member has released music solo (besides the chronically unassuming Colin Greenwood, whose own rock’n’roll dream entails moonlighting as a broadsheet columnist), band members almost never appear on the same side project, as if unconsciously preserving the group’s sanctity.

Their many devoted sleuths may suspect that, in the long tradition of stratospherically successful, decade-spanning rock groups, the guys just don’t love hanging out together anymore. (When Ed O’Brien released his solo album last year, he admitted that only the drummer Phil Selway had asked to hear it.) It was heartening, then, to see Yorke and Greenwood, the core songwriting duo, derive such palpable joy from their live debut as the Smile on a Glastonbury livestream last May. They enlisted Tom Skinner, the fidgety jazz drummer of Sons of Kemet, as their high-energy Selway substitute.

Until last night, the group had not brought that energy to a live audience. But in the first of three shows to be performed at Magazine London in 24 hours (which again livestreamed to paying fans), the trio slinked into a familiar rhythm. Yorke, Greenwood, and Skinner walked on to a creepy voiceover recording of William Blake’s poem “The Smile” and set up in the round, circled by pulsing neon-white tassels. As Yorke sat at the upright piano to perform “Pana-vision,” gauzy sheets of light appeared to enshroud the group within an orb.

From the band name to the poem to that Eraser-esque opening tune, the Smile’s lingua franca is one of lowkey spookiness. The odd, 7-beat rhythm of “Pana-vision” evokes a haunted waltz; “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings” alloys punky fervor with demonically arpeggiated synth; and even the relatively placid single “The Smoke” suggests a spectral spin on West African funk. The marquee rock tracks are not retro so much as uncanny, creating the out-of-time feel of a songwriting team whose primal impulses, long suppressed, are all tumbling out at once—an endearing, sporadic Radiohead mode that dates back to “2+2=5” and the dawn of the band’s ongoing third act.

Other songs in the set stray further afield. On “Thin Thing,” Skinner lays down a more explicitly jazzy rhythm as Yorke barks into a vocal-mangling mic over manic riffs and juddering bass. “Open the Floodgates” conceals a gorgeous acoustic ballad in ambient trinketry before collapsing into the post-rock soundscape that opens “A Hairdryer,” which shares some DNA with Radiohead loosie “These Are My Twisted Words.” A shoeless Greenwood saws away at a bass guitar with a violin bow, his white socks hovering over the effects pedals.

As ever, it is tempting to tune out Yorke and simply watch Greenwood; at one point, he plays piano with one hand while fingering a lyre with the other. On “Skrting on the Surface,” once earmarked for Radiohead (and probably the closest Greenwood will come to reciting the “Stairway to Heaven” riff), he lops his schoolboy fringe over the guitar while picking out a melody that melts into pleasingly celestial mush. For his part, Yorke is edging ever closer towards endearing midlife hippiness. “While trapped in a house for two years, one of the things I discovered is that it’s quite possible human beings are quite similar—not that we’re ever told that,” he says, muttering something about factions being pitted against each other. “Bollocks!” he concludes, and plays the band in to a spun-out piano ballad called “The Same,” which might be his prettiest song since “Videotape.”

There is space, too, for echoes of A Moon Shaped Pool in the folky “Speech Bubbles”—Skinner plays a dead ringer of Selway’s trademark splashy drums—which makes you wonder: If these could be Radiohead songs, why aren’t they? Despite variously evoking the Cure, Neil Young, James Holden, and Can’s archival live albums, it is striking that the set never resists the band’s long shadow. Unlike Yorke and Greenwood’s solo work, it presents a clear continuation of modern Radiohead, drawn from the received wisdom—at least, I suspect, between Yorke and Greenwood—that In Rainbows is the first album they really got right. In any case, it is not unflattering to suggest that, despite some superficial curveballs, the Smile sound like a consolidation of everything Yorke has done since.

This reality bodes well for more Smile recordings, and perhaps softens the blow that Radiohead appears, now more than ever, to be in limbo. “When we’ve written some more, we’ll do some more, but we haven’t written any more… yet,” Yorke concludes, before jerking into riff-rock anthem “You Will Never Work in Television Again.” After that, they regroup for an encore—the cascading “Just Eyes and Mouth,” which Yorke performs like an ’80s soul singer receiving electroshock therapy—and wrap up the set. Yorke bows, Greenwood looks around scratching his head, Skinner disappears, and the crowd applauds rapturously, hanging around in case they come back to play a Radiohead song.

The Smile at Magazine London; January 29, 2022 (early show) setlist:

Pana-vision
The Smoke
Speech Bubbles
Thin Thing
Open the Floodgates
Free in the Knowledge
A Hairdryer
Waving a White Flag
We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings
Skrting on the Surface
The Same
The Opposite
You Will Never Work in Television Again
Just Eyes and Mouth

 

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