Released: 26/01/24
What’s in a name – or rather, what’s attached to it? Well if you’re Radiohead, a ridiculous amount of hype and expectation with every release, plus a lot of heavy lifting: long hours in studio to create the thing, a longer tour, enervating press duties, and all the rest. And so, with a new name, newfound liberty – and as old Billy Shakes would've said, a band you like by any other name will sound as sweet. Of course, The Smile are not strictly Radiohead under a new moniker, but – and no disrespect to Ed O’Brien, Philip Selway, and Colin Greenwood – if we’re being honest, like Chandler and Rachael, Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood are by far the most talented of the bunch. And so, on The Smile’s excellent 2022 debut, A Light for Attracting Attention, the sense of freedom that comes from side-stepping the weight of legacy was almost palpable, not only in the relatively pared-back nature of the compositions, but also with the exploration of other genres – jazz, funk and Afrobeat among them – which one has to assume is down in large part to the third member of the band, the virtuosic drummer Tom Skinner of the brilliant British avant-jazz trailblazers Sons of Kemet.
In the best possible way then, Wall of Eyes is more of the same: simply sublime songwriting infused with a sense of liberation and playfulness, a place where tracks often move through a number of styles – such as the stunning penultimate track, ‘Bending Hectic’, which begins like an extremely mellow Yo La Tengo track, before transmuting into an intoxicatingly lush extended passage that sounds like a coagulation of John Barry’s Midnight Cowboy score, Serge Gainsbourg’s Melody Nelson, Lee and Nancy’s ‘Some Velvet Morning’, and Scott Walker’s ‘Montague Terrace in Blue’, then briefly hitting Penderecki atonal strings territory (a favourite Greenwood go-to), before ending in the guise of full-on primordial noise rock à la Bardo Pond. Phenomenal.