I’ve never been in a beloved band with a near-immaculate discography, but I have to imagine that, at some point, the paralyzing pressure of making a new album—of knowing you risk bumming out fans and mucking up a perfect legacy—sucks some of the joy and spontaneity out of music-making.
In other words: I get it, this whole Smile thing. Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood don’t want to spend four years obsessively laboring to complete a Radiohead album worthy of sitting next to A Moon Shaped Pool in your vinyl nook. They want to keep moving. Greenwood, the self-proclaimed “most impatient” member of Radiohead, once said he would prefer if “the records were 90 percent as good, but come out twice as often.” It’s in that spirit that the Smile, the little Radiohead spinoff that could, present their second album of 2024, cobbled together from the same sessions that produced Wall of Eyes but, like Amnesiac, too good to be dismissed as a bastard child.
Compared with its predecessor, Cutouts is looser, funkier—a thrilling testament to the near-telepathic chemistry these three musicians have honed across two years of touring. The stage is where many of these songs first premiered: the pastoral brooder “Bodies Laughing” in May 2022, a mere day after the band wrote it, and “Colours Fly” the following month in Paris, where guest musician Robert Stillman—then playing sax, now on bass clarinet—triggered the song’s ascent into squealing free-jazz delirium. Greenwood’s omnivorous curiosity is a big theme here. “Colours Fly,” with its frantic Egyptian scales, reflects Greenwood’s recent immersion in Middle Eastern music, notably as a collaborator of Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, while the pillowy synth overture that opens the record, “Foreign Spies,” repurposes elements from Greenwood’s 2019 classical piece Horror vacui.
Years ago, people snickered when Yorke formed a band with Flea, but the singer’s interest in counterbalancing his depressive tendencies with extremely sick grooves seems central to the Smile’s whole deal. He’s certainly found the guy for the job in Tom Skinner, a syncopation wizard behind the kit. Skinner anchors “Colours Fly” in an off-center 5/4 meter, underlines the burbling panic attack of “The Slip” with skittering hip-hop beats that resemble readymade sample packs, and gives us one of his most restlessly percolating grooves on the exhilarating “Eyes & Mouth,” another longtime live staple. Indeed, the only underwhelming tracks are those where Skinner is either sidelined (the aforementioned “Foreign Spies”) or reduced to thickets of auxiliary percussion (“Don’t Get Me Started”).