The Smile – Cutouts

Towards the end of the podcast series Dissect, which conducted a forensic song-by-song investigation of Radiohead’s In Rainbows across ten episodes, there’s a well-sourced aside about the reason the band’s albums have been so few and far between in the last 20 years: essentially, Thom Yorke can’t bring himself to greenlight a Radiohead release until he’s completely content with it all, and that’s a process that – understandably for the man who most embodies the band – takes time. On the other hand, if it were up to Johnny Greenwood, the aside continues, the new-material pipeline would flow more freely, as Radiohead’s second-in-command is apparently a proud imperfectionist, happy to get something sounding pretty good, release it, and crack on with whatever’s next.

In the grand arc of the Radiohead story (just three albums in the past two decades), this anecdote completely tracks. It also, however, goes some way to explaining The Smile, too, in which Greenwood has far greater songwriting and sign-off responsibility: Cutouts is The Smile’s third album since the end of lockdown (when they formed), and second this calendar year.

While this difference in approach provides a satisfying distinction between the two bands, it also contributes to understanding what The Smile actually is (and is not): on the evidence of their three swiftly recorded LPs (although not necessarily swiftly written, as we shall discover), it seems clear that this is not a project in pursuit of greatness, or even monumentalism. In fact, it seems to wilfully shun those qualities, so as to provide an outlet for two famously self-conscious musicians (alongside their brilliant drummer Tom Skinner) to create work relatively unscrutinised, unburdened by history or expectation. Sure, The Smile’s songs are the topics of countless Reddit threads, and each of their albums will receive long-form analysis (like this very review), but the overriding drivers for the project, perhaps counterintuitively for a spin-off from a band as emotionally wrought as Radiohead, appear to be not overthinking things too much, and – what a novel idea – having fun.

That’s not to say that The Smile, or Cutouts, is fun in the disposable, or jaunty, or amusing sense: after all, the lyricist is still Thom Yorke, and accordingly Cutouts’ landscape is still dotted with suspicion, where a yes is “not a real yes”, comic sarcasm (“Thinking all the ways the system will provide: / Windows ’95, Windows ’95”), and political anger (“All of you appeasers and enablers / Eating scraps from the swill”). But simultaneously, a sense of righteous enjoyment also permeates much of the text – these words are not the proxy-biographical howls of Radiohead’s peak, but the sound of a man luxuriating in cut-up wordplay and how language sounds when it’s sung and wrapped around synths, guitars and percussion.

Ditto the music: although there are moments, however fleeting, that definitely lend themselves to bodily abandon, we’re a long way from fun in the indie-disco or even mosh-pit senses with Cutouts, but even so, there’s a palpable sense throughout of a trio of expert players really revelling in the grooves and complexities of the music they’re making. That enjoyment is undeniably contagious: might be the funkiest this band has ever sounded, full of rasping saxes, taut guitars and half-spoken lyrical delivery that almost recalls early Stranglers in its sheer strut, and implores at least a foot-tap in the listener, if not a full-on pigeon-strut head-bob.

Equally, the second half of modal desert-blues workout ‘Colours Fly’, with its delicious skittering percussion and fluttering clarinets, slinks around with the sort of steely confidence that only arrives when a band are really delighting in their own music, and that sort of grace can’t help but extend beyond the confines of the song.

Slower ones, too, like opener ‘Foreign Spies’ and centrepiece ‘Don’t Get Me Started’, are also unconditionally gorgeous in a way that late-period Radiohead albums have often averred. The former’s synths, as soft and pure as gentle winter snowfall, combined with its quietly melancholic melody, leave it a set of sleigh bells away from being a full-blown sad Christmas record; the latter, meanwhile, leans hard into the locked repetition of Philip Glass-ian minimalism and ends up trancelike. Crucially, neither sound remotely agonised over – just performed relatively straightforwardly, recorded fairly simply and then bunged up on Spotify and onto a piece of vinyl – and that frictionless process is a joy.  

For all The Smile has successfully shaken off the exceptionalism of Radiohead, though, it’s notable that Cutouts isn’t the first time that Yorke and Greenwood have been involved in a quick-turnaround follow-up record, and the symmetries are striking. In June 2001, barely nine months after Kid A came out, Radiohead released Amnesiac, an album of songs that were recorded in the same sessions as Kid A, but for whatever reason didn’t fit the first release. Twenty-three years on, Amnesiac is now regarded as something of an odds-and-sods LP, a sort of wash-up/clear-out of work that was too good to leave on the cutting room floor, but too individually idiosyncratic – Dixieland trad-jazz closing number, anyone? – to slot into other future albums. As a result, it’s less an album, more an anthology, more a Kid B.

In terms of its creation biography, Cutouts is the same (with the band potentially even acknowledging that characteristic with its title): everything here was recorded in the same sessions as January’s Wall of Eyes, although, tellingly, some of the songs’ origins date far further back than last year. The eerily beautiful ‘Tiptoe’, for one, has been in gestation since at least the beginning of The Smile project, with out-take footage of Yorke noodling its intro before a Tiny Desk concert in 2022, meaning two albums have passed it by before it seeing the light of day. ‘Eyes & Mouth’ – a sort of post-punk sibling of ‘Zero Sum’ with that similar Stranglers strut – dates back even further: during Radiohead’s 2016 tour, their regular performances of ‘Talk Show Host’ descended into a fearsome polyrhythmic outro with an new riff that now comprises this song’s heart.

Going furthest back, the title and lyrics to closer ‘Bodies Laughing’ first appeared in 2005 on a blog post by Ed O’Brien on the official Radiohead website, and the song carries the same sort of chord progressions and songwriting tics that were preoccupying Yorke during that era. The track’s mid-noughties provenance also goes some way to explaining its anachronistic lyrics: after all, the only legitimate explanation for a song referencing happy slapping in 2024 is if the words were written in 2005.

Those are the ones for which cold hard evidence exists of their long gestations, and others still carry a certain nostalgic quality anyway that suggest similar: ‘Instant Psalm’’s pedal-droned acoustic guitar figure and earthy circular melody is very much in the mode of Yorke’s ballads from the mid-90s, and were it not for the extraordinary modern-Greenwood string arrangement that swirls around it so magically, you could believe it was an offcut from The Bends. ‘No Words’, similarly, has close riff-kinship with Amnesiac track ‘I Might Be Wrong’, and is the most overtly Radiohead thing The Smile have released so far.

It all makes for a sort of Jurassic Park effect: creatures from multiple disparate eras exhumed and re-engineered to coexist in the present day, with no individual element necessarily having much reason to show up alongside any other beyond sheer gleeful entertainment.

On Amnesiac, this compendium approach was to the album’s detriment, perhaps because the band name on the sleeve has always demanded a genius-level sense of overarching cohesion to its albums, leaving the distance between content and creator too wide. With The Smile, however, it’s less of a problem: previous LP Wall of Eyes unequivocally hangs together better, but when the band energy is so clearly this low-pressure – just a first-thought-best-thought-here’s-some-songs vibe – the emphasis of any album shifts from the whole to its parts: sure, Cutouts has a through-line that plays out well enough over its 45 minutes, but put it on shuffle and you’d barely notice a dip in the listening experience. The individual songs, on the other hand, are uniformly enthralling, captivating, thrilling and memorable, and perhaps the best collection that Yorke and Greenwood have been involved with since In Rainbows.

There’s a case to be made that at least three of Radiohead’s nine studio albums are bone fide masterpieces (you can argue about which ones among yourselves), and there’s a sense that because of that the heat is off The Smile to be capital-G Great. Instead, they can be a really satisfying jam band, or a vessel for experimentation,  a good old-fashioned side-project self-indulgence, or, in this case, a repository for lost songs. The key is that it doesn’t really matter, and when you’ve spent your entire adult life being told that your main band Really Does, that must be incredibly freeing.

That certainly comes across when watching the band perform: Yorke in particular seems unshackled from the unbearable heaviness of being the lead singer of Radiohead, grinning ear to ear while playing teenage-bedroom bass riffs around Skinner and Greenwood’s intricacies. And it also comes across in Cutouts, perhaps more than any previous Smile release: this is just a really enjoyable piece of work, full of beautiful sounds and inventive playing, addictive grooves and crackling atmospheres. And if you don’t like it? Relax: Johnny will make sure there’s another one along in a bit.