The Smile announce their first album, A Light for Attracting Attention

The Smile have announced their first album, A Light for Attracting Attention, out digitally on XL Recordings on 13 May. CD and vinyl follow on 17 June.

The band are Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner of Sons of Kemet, and they have been letting the songs out one at a time: “You Will Never Work in Television Again”, “The Smoke”, “Skrting on the Surface” and “Pana-vision”, which was used in the final episode of Peaky Blinders. Greenwood's statement for the album apologises for the slow drip. I can only apologize for our tentativeness. Patience is a virtue, but then, so are sobriety and humility - and they're not happening either.²

A fifth single came out with the news. “Free in the Knowledge” has a video directed by Leo Leigh, in which a group of grieving men stand around a funeral pyre. Yorke first sang it alone at Letters Live at the Royal Albert Hall on 30 October 2021, his first show since the pandemic began, and dedicated it to his fellow British musicians.

So far The Smile have played only three sold-out shows at Magazine London in January, streamed around the world. Their European tour opens in Zagreb on 16 May, three days after the album, and ends in Taormina on 20 July; Down The Rabbit Hole in the Netherlands is now on it too, on 2 July.

Nigel Godrich produced and mixed the album, and Bob Ludwig mastered it. The London Contemporary Orchestra plays the strings, and the brass is a section of British jazz players: Byron Wallen, Theon and Nathaniel Cross, Chelsea Carmichael, Robert Stillman and Jason Yarde. Greenwood is grateful that with Godrich's help the songs were recorded as they deserved, cannot wait for people to hear those players, and says the singles released so far have been liked - as far as I can tell - which makes me feel dangerously confident in the rest of the record.²

A Light for Attracting Attention, tracklist