Album review: Wall of Eyes by The Smile has inevitable echoes of Radiohead
The Smile: Tom Skinner (drums), Thom Yorke (vocals, guitar, bass, keys), and Jonny Greenwood (guitar, bass, keys).
The Smile, Wall of Eyes
★★★★☆
Radiohead’s 2017 concert at Dublin’s 3Arena was a five-star knock-out. But was it also part of a long fade-out from the arena-filling art rockers? In the years since the band have embarked on various side-projects – with guitarist Ed O’Brien releasing a record as EOB and drummer Philip Selway pressing on with his solo career (and jokingly offering to cover for Larry Mullen Jr in U2).
Likewise keeping busy has been the engine room of the group: singer Thom Yorke and guitarist Jonny Greenwood. They’ve allied with jazz drummer Tom Skinner – a founder of jazz troupe Sons of Kemet who first collaborated with Greenwood on the 2012 soundtrack to Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master.
In 2021, the trio came together as The Smile, making a surprise debut appearance at a live-stream event organised by the Glastonbury festival. This was widely acclaimed by everyone aside from Taylor Swift fans, who’d secretly hoped the “surprise guest” at the concert was the 'Shake It Off' singer.
Shaking it off is one thing The Smile don’t seem interested in. As is perhaps inevitable from a project featuring the singer and lead guitarist with Radiohead, their second studio album, Wall of Eyes, feels like a cousin once removed of their other band, with echoes of 2016’s stately a Moon-Shaped Pool especially discernible.
This is in no way a negative. Wall of Eyes is beautifully frosty – another reminder of Yorke and Greenwood’s ability to blend tension, melancholy and “hummability”. It starts with the stoic chug of the title track, where a simple Greenwood riff intertwines around Yorke’s crestfallen voice.
The jittery quality, long a feature of the duo’s writing, is ever-present. It is cranked up with a vengeance on the shapeshifting 'Under Our Pillows', which evokes the knotty majesty of Radiohead’s 'In Rainbows' (with Skinner’s drumming adding an extra dimension of bustle and hustle).
But a sense of calm intrudes on closer 'You Know Me' as, hemmed in by a subzero piano line, Yorke sings into the old, crisp air. It’s a powerful conclusion to an LP that suggests that, whatever name they record under, Yorke and Greenwood still have lots to say.
