The Smile’s Cutouts Reviewed: Expanding on Radiohead’s Legacy

Published 10/23/2024 in the Cornell Daily Sun

The Smile’s Cutouts Reviewed: Expanding on Radiohead’s Legacy

The gaunt, ghostly, yet somehow still youthful voice of Thom Yorke weaves with electronic horns and strings on lead track “Foreign Spies,” the opener of The Smile’s recent album, Cutouts, released Friday Oct. 4. It all lounges atop a lascivious, eerie syncopation familiar to listeners of The Smile. Formed six years ago, the band doesn’t deign to refuse Yorke’s 45 year long career; the dark lyricism, cunning juxtaposition and reflexive aural motifs draw on and rework Radiohead’s revered discography and The Smile’s earlier releases A Light for Attracting Attention (2022) and Wall of Eyes (January 2024). Cutouts aims for a cohesive theme on their trajectory as a band.

The album’s second song, “Instant Psalm,” reaps the band’s history of embracing contradiction not only in title, mocking the virtuous voices in music and authoritative moral commentary in a mirror of self reflection, but also in its sound and lyrics. The slow pace creeps alongside words heavy with societal critique, addressing the vapid constructions of how people come by their ethics. The song repeats in its confused, dissonant finale “Like a wind blows in its emptiness / Yes is not a real yes / Not a real yes.” The lyrical line of questioning is concise, Shakespearean; do people really mean what they say? Chilling and grim, The Smile answer no.

In a surprise, Yorke does his best Anthony Kiedis impression on “Zero Sum.” Barking back, the curt, quick intonations reminisce on the ’90s angst rock tradition traversed alongside the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on albums like Radiohead’s The Bends. This glimmer of the past reshapes and evolves throughout the album, returning on the final two songs “No Words” and “Bodies Laughing,”  but distinctly accompanying a heightened electronic presence. Many of the compositions bring together different elements of Yorke and longtime Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood’s past sounds, compiling the compendium of their past creations into something new.

It’s all too possible to listen to a song and hear multiple eras of the alt-rock goliath that still has over 30 million monthly Spotify listeners, as well as parts of the two previous albums the Smile has constructed.Let’s peruse the representative track, “This Slip.” Prominently, Yorke’s high-soaring vocals cruise in the same tenor integral to the allure of A Moon Shaped Pool (2016) on songs like “Burn the Witch” and “True Love Waits.” Crisp, well-paced snappy drum openings are a Radiohead classic as well, used in “The Slip” to entice any listening ear. These can also be heard in bulk throughout the Radiohead catalog, such as on “A Wolf At the Door,” Hail to the Thief’s (2005) final track. The leading simultaneous click opens the same album in “Sit Down. Stand up.” The tonal and lyrical backtracking is endless. While the band rewords and reworks itself in the new formation of The Smile, it progresses Yorke and Greenwood’s legacy to new territory.

Cutouts echoes itself in a place where previous albums that the prolific duo have collaborated on choose to progress. “Don’t Get me Started” plays the mimicry for “Foreign Spies” in it’s undulating electronic keyboard. Circling back on the drum pattern of “Eyes and Mouth” at the song’s bridge, its able to empower the spacious, rippling vocal as heard in “Colors Fly.” The disaffective lyrical upset rings in this song as in the rest, repeating in its crouching urgency “your voice means nothing / You don't get me.”

The Smile may be overcommitting themselves to the sinister implications of their name and two previous albums; the musical narrative, so oft repeated and nearly ubiquitous in previous work, begins to blur. The vibrations are mostly magnetic, but sometimes overbearing. The track “Tiptoe” slowly  inspects the vermin of humanity in rich strings, edging piano and Yorke’s dark words, throwing off the pace of the album and beleaguering the argument wreathed in gloom.

What The Smile has accomplished is impressive. In their album covers alone, there is a cohesion which most bands fail to achieve successfully in any element of their work. Thom Yorke codesigned the albums with Stanley Donwood, who has made the visual art for Yorke’s musical projects since 1994. Using gouache paint, Donwood has retained these leaking, uneven lines, creating depth through patchwork contrast. Each cover has disconcerting natural forms, from a patterned, porous body of water, to a forest of branchless black spires, to large microorganisms. The retention of brushstrokes, splotches and dripping paint alongside clear cut painted portions is unsettling. Each cover is bound by the same bold  font, and “The Smile” glaring out.

The last track on the album,  “Bodies Laughing,” paradoxically disembodies consciousness from the flesh, in typical The Smile fashion. It uses acoustic guitar for the only time on the album, returning from the electronic space it so heavily presented over its course. One of my favorite lyrics, “They snort and then they hoot / They’re lapping up the soup” illuminates humanity’s ignorance, and the dangers therein posed. Yorke will no doubt continue his musing on human agency, with warnings of an apocalyptic future and the advancement of technology, clearly explored in sound and lyric in Cutouts. “We can’t control it anymore / Control it anymore;” Yorke and his latest ensemble pose as a harbinger, calmly smiling at what may come.