The Smile - Cutouts (2024)

Wasting no time, Cutouts arrives in the same year as The Smile's Wall of Eyes. And as we close in on a decade without new material from Radiohead, the third record from The Smile —Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, along with drummer Tom Skinner, otherwise known for his jazz work—is a strong fill-in. There's a familiarity here, and not just because some of the songs have already been performed on the road. But The Smile is clearly its own thing as well. Greenwood is flying wild, especially on songs like "Eyes & Mouth"—guitar getting into virtuosic territory against Skinner's racehorse jazz drums and somber piano—and "Zero Sum." The latter also features traffic-jam blares and Yorke posturing with punk meets funk swagger as he, familiarly, warns about some kind of charlatans: "They're so overconfident, confident, confident/ That's another red flag, red flag." Indeed, Yorke comes on like a strong societal critic, shaking his head over fakes and hucksters—and it could be about disinformation, or politics, or AI, or any other number of things.

"I'm not the killer/ Don't get me started/ I'm not the villain … Nothing is triggered," he sings under a heavy echo influence on "Don't Get Me Started," sounding as if he's pushing back on the weaponization of modern therapy-speak. Hand drums build to a steady, forceful thrum and almost comical keys, like the soundtrack to a cartoon spy sneaking around a corner, turn into a mesmerizing piano line that ebbs and flows in the mix. Yorke raises the alarm about "All of you appeasers and enablers/ Eating scraps from the swill" on "Tiptoe," alongside jazz-bar piano and classical strings that seem to exhale in relief. Glistening, gleaming "Instant Psalm" involves more than 40 orchestral players as it, mysteriously, stays its pace; there is no tantalizing build. "The Slip" folds in rim knocks, funky guitar runs and slippery bass; "No Words" runs on spacey synth, angular New Wave beats and post-punk guitar discordance, with a levity to Yorke's vocal delivery. And "Foreign Spies" free-floats, anchored only by a percussive rhythm that sounds like an old sci-fi computer. "It's a beautiful world," Yorke declares over and over, seemingly unburdened even as he twists in his sheets: "And they're grabbing/ Kitchen knives/ Every time our/ Backs are turned." © Shelly Ridenour

Tracklist
1 Foreign Spies
2 Instant Psalm
3 Zero Sum
4 Colours Fly
5 Eyes & Mouth
6 Don't Get Me Started
7 Tiptoe
8 The Slip
9 UGcgWGFkcWE=
10 Bodies Laughing