The Smile release a live record of their Montreux show

The Smile At Montreux Jazz Festival, July 2022 is out today, 14 December, the band's first live album: a digital-only record of their show at the Montreux Jazz Lab on 12 July. The Smile announced it on 12 December, and it comes out while they are in North America, playing Portland tonight on their first tour there.

All seven tracks are from A Light for Attracting Attention, with “Free In The Knowledge” and “A Hairdryer” sharing track five. The festival puts the crowd that night at 2,000, and sets the record on its shelf of Montreux recordings beside Miles Davis, Nina Simone and Wu-Tang Clan. Speaking for the festival, Mathieu Jaton links the night to Radiohead's show in the Auditorium Stravinski on the Hail to the Thief tour in July 2003 and to Thom Yorke's solo concert in the same hall in 2019. This is the continuation of a beautiful story between Thom Yorke and the Montreux Jazz Festival¹²

The one song the band played for the first time that night is not on it. “Bending Hectic”, played for the first time at Montreux, is only in the film of the show, about 42 minutes long, which went up on the band's YouTube channel at 8pm UK time yesterday for 48 hours. The festival says the band wrote it while they were staying in the town, and they have played it more than 20 times since. On the night Yorke told the crowd how new the words were. Yeah I can see the words. That's good because I just wrote them about half an hour ago.¹⁵

Tracklist