The Smile's first album, A Light for Attracting Attention, is out

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

Two of its songs are older than the band. Thom Yorke played “Open the Floodgates” and “Skirting on the Surface” alone at the piano at his first Los Angeles shows in October 2009, and Radiohead tried an early full-band “Skirting” on the King of Limbs tour, first in Dallas on 5 March 2012, then in Austin and Mexico City. On the album it is spelled “Skrting on the Surface”.

Of the 13 tracks, six were already out as singles, the last of them “Thin Thing” on 9 May. Nigel Godrich produced and mixed the record, with the London Contemporary Orchestra on strings and a brass section of British jazz players, as the band set out in April. The cover art is by Yorke and Stanley Donwood.

Jonny Greenwood is still listening to the album constantly, he says in a statement for the release, long after he should have had enough of it, and a small part of him sees it as a way for people to learn the songs before the shows. Live concerts are short-sighted, short-lived things, and all the more vital because of it.¹

Until now The Smile have played only the three livestreamed nights at Magazine London in January, and their first tour opens at the Hala in Zagreb on 16 May. I can't really think beyond the first chord of the first concert in Croatia because that's where so much of the excitement is for me.¹