The Smile release their first single and say the album is nearly done

The Smile released their first single, “You Will Never Work in Television Again”, on XL on 5 January.

The album is just about finished, Nigel Godrich has produced it – we’re nearly at the track-listing stage, where there are 6227020800 possible song orders.

The Smile²

That was the band's message with the song, and the figure is 13 factorial, the number of ways to put 13 songs in order.

Their first concerts with an audience are at Magazine London on 29 and 30 January, three of them inside 15 hours, in the round to a seated crowd. Each is streamed live, timed for a different part of the world, and Paul Dugdale films them.

The trio first played the song at their first performance, a surprise set in Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm stream last May, without Godrich. Their name comes from a Ted Hughes poem, and Thom Yorke said that night that the smile is the one worn by a man who lies every day.

The single runs just under three minutes, and the lyric video, which The Fire Note credits to Duncan Loudon, rolls the words up a teleprompter. Clash calls it a hard-driving rock song. Godrich said in July that the album, whatever its first single suggests, is not a rock record.