The Smile’s second album Wall of Eyes will both sate Radiohead fans and raise their anxiety about seeing the legendary rock band re-form.
When Radiohead side project the Smile released their debut album A Light for Attracting Attention in 2022, I thought it would be a one-off release. After all, the last time Radiohead frontman Thom Yorke featured in a side project was the supergroup Atoms for Peace, who released their only album Amok in 2013. Besides, the Smile was only started as a creative outlet for Yorke, Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, and sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner during the COVID lockdowns. Their debut was very good for something formed on a whim like that, but now that Radiohead’s members could get the band back together, why wouldn’t they?
Thankfully, the Smile’s second album Wall of Eyes will both sate Radiohead fans and raise their anxiety about seeing the legendary rock band re-form.
Radiohead hasn’t released an album since 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool, and has only really focused on reissues and previously released material since then – no new recordings. Wall of Eyes meanwhile draws from the backlog of ideas its members had during COVID lockdowns, and builds off of the momentum of a fresh new project. It’s not quite that the Smile are the new Radiohead, but Wall of Eyes is a step closer to “successor band” than “side project.”
This level of complexity is arguably the biggest difference between the Smile’s two albums. While A Light for Attracting Attention featured thirteen songs that each contained one idea, Wall of Eyes instead contains eight dense tracks that occasionally make unexpected twists and turns. “Read the Room” starts with a discordant electric guitar melody whose unease is buoyed by an unconventional time signature (allegedly 11/8?), before switching gears entirely to a more psychedelic and prog rock-inspired ending. It’s a compelling song, but the album’s climax comes a few tracks later with “Bending Hectic.” This eight-minute tour de force starts as the most delicate of ballads, complete with fairytale strings, bent guitar notes that sound like they’re taking flight, and Skinner doing the gentlest of drum taps. All the while, Yorke is sweetly and soulfully singing about…driving his car off of a cliff. Just as you settle into five minutes of this splendor, there’s a crescendo of strings as eerie as those on Radiohead’s “Climbing Up the Walls,” and then a crash of electric guitar power chords that mark the band shredding their way to the conclusion. “Bending Hectic” was love at first listen, and is going to be one of the best songs you’ll hear in 2024.
The other differences that distinguish Wall of Eyes are generally less exciting. On the positive side, there are some occasional flourishes that are as pleasant as they are unexpected. For instance, “Teleharmonic” has a minimal beat and an overall tone similar to “Speech Bubbles” on A Light for Attracting Attention, but substitutes the latter’s strings for a subtle flute part. On the negative side, Wall of Eyes forgoes some of the more gripping parts of its predecessor. There’s much less synthesizer this time, meaning there’s nothing like “The Same” or “Waving a White Flag.” There’s also nothing like the straightforward rockers “You Will Never Work in Television Again” or “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings,” which were some of my favorites from the debut. Instead, Wall of Eyes delivers more on the understated front, which gives us the aforementioned title track and “Teleharmonic” alongside the snoozier tracks “I Quit” and album closer “You Know Me!” It’s an altogether less accessible album, but since the band’s fanbase is almost entirely made up of diehard Radiohead fans who have followed them for decades, it’s a risk they can take.
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