The Smile Cutouts

Given that it evolved from an urge to do something—anything—creative during the pandemic, The Smile has turned out to be one of the most liberating and fruitful projects of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood’s latter-day career. Cutouts is the third record in little more than two years from the trio, which also includes Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner, and follows just 10 months after their captivating second album Wall of Eyes. Its creation mirrors the cross-pollination that occurred between a pair of classic Radiohead albums. In much the same way that 2000’s Kid A and 2001’s Amnesiac were made during the same recording sessions but inhabited different sonic spaces and textures, Cutouts contains songs committed to tape at the same time as Wall of Eyes in Oxford and London’s Abbey Road Studios with producer Sam Petts-Davies. Whereas Wall of Eyes mesmerised with a tightly wound, autumnal restraint, there’s an unfurling expanse at work on Cutouts’ 10 tracks. With its cascading riffs, soulful piano chords and yearning vocals, “Eyes & Mouth” is the epic centre around which everything else revolves. The record never settles in one spot for too long: “Instant Psalm”, featuring beatific strings from the London Contemporary Orchestra, is a hazy folk gem, and “The Slip” is a synth-laden banger, while the frantic punk-funk grooves of “Zero Sum” sound like they’re trying to wriggle out of themselves. It remains to be seen whether anything can be read into the trio clearing the decks with this collection of songs, some of which were played live around the time of their 2022 debut A Light for Attracting Attention (or in some cases, even deeper into the past—the title of contemplative closer “Bodies Laughing” can be traced back to Radiohead rehearsals in the mid-2000s). But if Cutouts is the end of an era for The Smile, it caps off a prolific, potent period for Yorke, Greenwood and Skinner.