“Hey man, slow down!” Thom Yorke exclaimed in the waning moments of arguably his greatest album. The music for “The Tourist,” which closes out Radiohead’s OK Computer at an appropriately unhurried pace, was composed by Yorke’s bandmate Jonny Greenwood after seeing out-of-towners obliviously blazing through a town in France. If the song begins as a friendly reminder, it quickly evolves into a pointed rebuke: “Idiot, slow down!” It is a tune about stopping to smell the roses rather than racing from one checkpoint to the next — good advice for those seeking to get the most out of life. Maybe, if released today, it would have a lyric about putting your phone down.
“The Tourist” came to mind when I learned the Smile would be releasing another new album so soon after the last one. Cutouts is the band’s third LP in just over two years and their second in eight months. As a self-professed fanboy who spent the four-year gap between In Rainbows and The King Of Limbs, uh, in limbo, I am not about to complain about an abundance of new tunes from Yorke and Greenwood, the Radiohead braintrust who teamed up with drummer Tom Skinner to form the Smile in 2019. Every new song from this crew has the potential to be transcendently, life-alteringly great, so I’ll take every last second of sound they can give me.
A lot of the Smile’s music is that good. My main qualms about the current arrangement are that the band’s prolific output has not been subject to the same rigorous level of quality control that tends to guard Radiohead releases, and the sequencing on these releases is getting increasingly confusing. As someone deeply invested in the idea of classic albums, I want not just a pile of new tracks but a cohesive statement that sends me reeling the same way, say, A Moon Shaped Pool did.
That album, released more than eight years ago, was carefully assembled into a powerful coherent statement. Like the best Radiohead albums, it hung together — in this case, with a twilit melancholia that made even its most minor tracks feel epic and significant. Whereas every album by the Smile has felt like a bunch of songs on shuffle, a compendium of whatever they’ve been working on lately. That more randomized approach worked out alright on 2022 debut A Light For Attracting Attention, but it led to a disjointed experience on this year’s Wall Of Eyes. It dovetails with the Smile’s status as Yorke and Greenwood’s vehicle for letting their hair down (metaphorically, of course; Greenwood’s bangs-in-the-face look will never, ever change). Onstage, the Smile are a jazzier, jammier beast than Radiohead ever were, which can be a thrilling experience when the band is locked in. Though more technically flashy, especially when Greenwood grabs a guitar and shows us how fast his fingers can move, it’s a far less fussy operation.
On Cutouts, those busily skittering moments can be incendiary. I have played “Zero Sum,” maybe the most frenetic track Yorke and Greenwood have ever given us, more than any Smile song to date. Greenwood’s guitar work there is an unbelievable physical achievement, the kind of sound that makes your eyes pop out when it enters your ears, but more importantly, it’s spring-loaded into a brilliantly constructed song that deploys all that energy to dynamic effect, with nifty cowbell and strutting regal brass. “Eyes & Mouth” similarly situates its geyser of upwardly spiraling riffs within a tightly rolling drumbeat and jazzy piano chords that gorgeously recontextualize all that racket. “Colours Fly” rides an Egyptian scale into clouds of noise, like “Pyramid Song” crossed with “The National Anthem,” while the band builds a relentless groove on “No Words” by stitching Greenwood’s low-end riff into Skinner’s drumbeat. On “The Slip,” when the biting two-chord riff splinters off into squealing string bends, I get flickers of the same rush I got from Greenwood’s playing in the ‘90s. Despite his achievements as a composer and arranger, the man was born to wrangle epiphanies from the neck of a guitar, and it’s a genuine privilege to hear him cutting loose again.
The Smile are at their best when they’re hitting hard. A whole album of songs in that breathless uptempo mode would be an instant classic, and Cutouts gets about halfway there. But the band seems interested in exploring all sides of Yorke’s songwriting, so the album becomes another variety pack with uneven results. The slow jams can be stunners too, as proven by “Instant Psalm”; with its hypnotic acoustic groove, a striking string arrangement, and peak Yorke lyrics like “Loneliness is a way to drown,” it would have fit right in on Pool. But a lot of the ballads play out like the dirges every Radiohead hater imagines when they’re channeling Cher Horowitz. Opener “Foreign Spies” is such a profound drag that no amount of lush orchestration can save it. The mood piece “Tiptoe” similarly drones on, beautifully rendered but entirely without momentum. Even “Don’t Get Me Started,” which lays intense percussive action behind an ominous synth riff that sounds like it’s wobbling up and down a staircase, blurs into the background rather than drawing me in.
Wall Of Eyes hinted at this problem with “Bending Hectic,” a song that meanders for five and a half minutes before bottoming out into euphoria. The payoff is tremendous, but the journey there becomes a slog. It may be that the Smile aren’t as good at quieter, slower, more contemplative material, or it may be that they’re missing the guiding hand of Nigel Godrich. The longtime Radiohead producer helmed A Light For Attracting Attention but ceded control to Sam Petts-Davies on Wall Of Eyes and Cutouts, which were culled from the same sessions like Kid A and Amnesiac. The Petts-Davies recordings are rawer and drier, which lends forceful impact to every scrape and skitter on the uptempo tracks but leaves the slower songs feeling less immersive, more adrift. Revisiting the Smile’s debut, the lurching, languishing numbers grabbed me way more emphatically than they do on these past two LPs.
When I step back and survey the big picture, these quibbles start to seem relatively minor. Does Cutouts weirdly put two slow songs at the front of the tracklist even though its greatest triumphs are on the more aggressive side? Yes. Do I wish they’d get Godrich back in the studio to lend some of his special sauce to these more atmospheric experiments? Definitely. Am I still dying for another Radiohead album? You know it. But on balance, there are more than enough glorious moments on the new album to satisfy those of us who’ve spent our lives gobbling up anything Yorke and Greenwood will serve us. It’s possible that the Smile could have built one masterpiece out of their pair of 2024 albums, but the two they’ve given are fascinating and rewarding enough to justify existing as distinct releases. And given the disparity in quality between the rave-ups and the more patient, challenging tracks, maybe the Smile don’t actually need to slow down. Maybe they ought to keep surging forward as fast as they can.
Cutouts is out 10/4 via XL.
