The Smile is not Radiohead, but you could be forgiven if you thought otherwise. Singer Thom Yorke and guitarist-arranger Jonny Greenwood are the essential sound of Radiohead. Yorke and Greenwood collaborated during lockdown, and what started as a splinter project has taken on a life of its own. Their new album, A Light for Attracting Attention, dropped May 13, and having added the drummer Tom Skinner, this trio sounds fully formed. That light may be attracting attention, but be careful. It leads to much numinous darkness, a sonic chiaroscuro.
Radiohead made its debut 30 years ago with “Creep,” a 90s classic of sublime self-laceration (“I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo. / What the hell am I doin’ here?”)—and that was just the beginning. The album OK Computer (1997) spoke to an audience that hated the technology it depended on, yet needed beauty more than ever. The music was heavenly, but lines such as “Her Hitler hairdo is making me feel ill” and “A handshake of carbon monoxide” were not exactly comforting. The band kept mutating, each album a new discovery. And when Greenwood created virtuosic Oscar-nominated film scores for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread and Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, it demonstrated that Radiohead had been creating pop-song-size symphonies all along.
