As far back as 2009, Jonny Greenwood was fed up with the faff of the world’s most studious stadium band. “He can’t stand it anymore, the pace of the way we work,” Thom Yorke said that year. Despite the guitarist and composer’s impatience, he was prone to obsessing over what Yorke called the “extra things”: the sly strings and choked squeals that thread razor wire into Radiohead’s pillowed luxury. “‘Come on, we need some wrong notes,’ he’s always saying. OK, you got ’em,” Yorke joked. But never have we heard Greenwood quite like this. On Wall of Eyes , the second album from the Smile, his hostile harmonies and expediency in the studio nudge the trio somewhere new; it is his most exciting and volatile performance since In Rainbows . No time for their usual effortful cohesion: Producer Sam Petts-Davies resolves to stress, not conceal, the eclecticism of Yorke and Greenwood’s songs, while drummer Tom Skinner squirrels around making nests in their inhospitable time signatures. After the debut’s big bang, Wall of Eyes connects the particles into somewhere you, and perhaps these restless musicians, might like to make a home. More than anything on A Light for Attracting Attention , the Beatlesy “Friend of a Friend” and riotous “Bending Hectic” present contrasting spectacles of the Smile’s allure. The former draws inspiration from lockdown footage of Italians uniting in song on their balconies; the coda juxtaposes that pandemic solidarity against the elites’ response. “All of that money, where did it go?/In somebody’s pocket, a friend of a friend,” Yorke laments, invoking the COVID cronyism of Britain’s Conservative Party. But the tune is divine, even hummable—his deftest lunge for your heartstrings since unshelving “True Love Waits.” At the other extreme, “Bending Hectic” indulges Yorke’s time-honored passion for calamitous automobile events—in this case the last moments of a public figure, apparently disgraced, who vows to drive off the Italian mountainside. The band plays the car-crash suicide ballad as a brilliantly twisted love song: Such is the narrator’s hubris that, when an orchestral crescendo signals the plunge, and Greenwood’s lustrous string bends transmute into tire squeals, we hear the infernal crusade as a valorous final act.
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