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\u201cDon\u2019t think you know me,\u201d Thom Yorke intones<\/a> near the end of the Smile\u2019s second studio album, \u201cWall of Eyes.\u201d He adds, \u201cDon\u2019t think that I am everything you say.\u201d With its new LP, the Smile makes itself increasingly elusive. It\u2019s now a band intent on destabilizing structures and dissolving expectations.<\/p>\n The Smile is still unmistakably a Radiohead spinoff. It\u2019s the trio of Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, with the British jazz drummer Tom Skinner. Yorke\u2019s tormented voice has stayed upfront, and the songwriting leans into Radiohead\u2019s dissonances, odd meters and fully enveloping aura of anxiety.<\/p>\n The Smile\u2019s 2022 debut album, \u201cA Light for Attracting Attention,\u201d and its live recordings introduced what was mostly a stripped-down, cerebrally twisted funk band \u2014 akin to Yorke\u2019s 2012 project Atoms for Peace, which had Flea from Red Hot Chili Peppers on bass. But on \u201cWall of Eyes,\u201d<\/a> the Smile questions and undermines its grooves. The band often lets them emerge only gradually, then deflates them or obscures them in complexly hazy productions.<\/p>\n In the Smile\u2019s new songs, solid ground \u2014 verbal or musical \u2014 is rare and precarious. The priority is atmosphere, not legibility. Yorke\u2019s lyrics are fragmentary and bleak, full of apocalyptic tidings. \u201cSoon you\u2019ll be there\/in all that fire and ice,\u201d he croons in \u201cTeleharmonic,\u201d<\/a> over chords that keep sliding out from under him. The album\u2019s most coherent narrative, \u201cBending Hectic,\u201d<\/a> is the last words of a driver steering along the hairpin turns of an Italian mountain road, then \u201cletting go of the wheel.\u201d The track is an eight-minute exercise in suspended time, meditating on two slowly alternating chords before plunging into a cacophony of hard-rock guitars.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Greenwood has long had a sideline scoring film soundtracks<\/a> \u2014 among them \u201cThere Will Be Blood,\u201d \u201cPhantom Thread\u201d and \u201cThe Power of the Dog\u201d \u2014 and the Smile\u2019s new songs allow themselves to be as amorphous and open-ended as film music. They\u2019re not about hooks or choruses. Melodies recur while arrangements change radically around them; songs suddenly leap into entirely new territory.<\/p>\n \u201cRead the Room\u201d<\/a> begins with prickly guitar arpeggios and a sputtering beat, veers into a pretty bridge that doesn\u2019t stay that way and spends its final two minutes seething over an entirely different riff. \u201cUnder Our Pillows,\u201d<\/a> which may be a reproach of social media \u2014 \u201cYou give yourself freely\/Nowadays everyone\u2019s for sharing,\u201d Yorke chides \u2014 starts with crisp cross-rhythms: hopscotching guitar picking and a contrapuntal bass line over Skinner\u2019s stop-start drumming. But the momentum shifts, the odd meter turns into a motoric 4\/4 and then recedes into un-metered, breathy spaces. For a full minute, the track is nervous but ambient. Throughout the album, the Smile\u2019s music feels molten and improvisatory, though it\u2019s clearly premeditated.<\/p>\n Greenwood\u2019s film scores often deploy orchestral arrangements, and so does the Smile. Half of the album\u2019s new songs are overlaid with strings played by the London Contemporary Orchestra \u2014 occasionally for sumptuousness, but more often to create tension and harmonic ambiguity. Some songs end with a full minute of cloudy orchestral sounds, every one of them calibrated.<\/p>\n Perhaps Radiohead\u2019s internal decision-making grew too weighty or complicated. It\u2019s easier to work as a trio than as an arty but arena-filling, much-scrutinized institution. In \u201cFriend of a Friend,\u201d<\/a> Yorke sings, \u201cI can go anywhere that I want\/I just got to turn myself inside out and back to front.\u201d For the Smile, that could be a mission statement, from a band determined to evolve in its own ways.<\/p>\n The Smile
\u201cWall of Eyes\u201d
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