The Smile released their second album, Wall of Eyes, on January 26. Following their 2021 debut, A Light for Attracting Attention, this second go for the band improved on everything that their first album did.
Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood
Found by searching for Commercial-use images, courtesy of pitchfork.com
The Smile is an English rock band comprised of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead, along with Tom Skinner, a rock artist and the band’s drummer.
Leading up to the release of the album, the band released a few leading singles, like “Bending Hectic,” “Wall of Eyes” and “Friend of a Friend” with the most impressive of these being “Bending Hectic” by a long shot, and likely being the greatest song on the album in its entirety.
“Bending Hectic,” the beautiful lead single and second to last song on the album, serves as the crescendo that ends the album on a high note, as with the song having a beautiful crescendo as well that explodes in the final two minutes of the track, acting as the high point of the entire album.
Wall of Eyes is a more experimental sounding album than their debut, with tracks like “Teleharmonic” and “You Know Me!” offering more of a soundscape with whirring vocals and immersive instrumentals that almost provide a feeling of drowning into the music.
Some of the best moments on the album come from Yorke’s vocal performances, especially on tracks like “Bending Hectic” and “Read the Room” which both feel like he is experimenting with more range in his vocal performance.
Yorke is notorious for singing in falsetto, especially on Radiohead tracks like “Reckoner,” and it can be said that there was a lot less of that on this album. Not to say it’s completely absent, or that his falsetto is bad, but it does feel more authentic and natural without him trying to hit such high notes and instead staying in a register he appears to be more comfortable in.
When discussing The Smile, it is hard not to mention Radiohead, as the lead two members of Radiohead are also the lead two members of The Smile. The Smile has almost served as a vessel for Greenwood and Yorke to work on music without having to meet the impossibly high standards of Radiohead’s multi-decade career.
However, when comparing this album to Radiohead’s material, it falls somewhere among the crowd of Kid A/Amnesiac and King of Limbs. It serves as a more experimental and produced album, again, focusing on creating beautiful soundscapes and grand pieces of music rather than a traditional rock album like the Smile’s other album, A Light for Attracting Attention, which has comparisons to a Pablo Honey/The Bends era Radiohead, which focused on more traditional rock songs and not really aiming for being considered “experimental.”
Critically, this album was received extremely well, with music review sites like Pitchfork giving the album an 8.5 out of 10. Personally, I would consider this album a solid 8 as the material itself was beautiful. This doesn’t mean that it necessarily tried anything new or revolutionary for music as a whole, but it doesn’t mean anything bad either as the album felt like a beautiful new step for Yorke and Greenwood by being different enough from previous material to feel new, but familiar enough to feel comfortable.
To promote the album, The Smile is going on tour for the album, but only in Europe. An American tour is likely to happen after, as the band did a similar touring pattern for their previous album. I personally hope that they do an American tour for this album, as this album was beautiful from the studio and likely more beautiful live.
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