The Smile release Cutouts, their second album of 2024

The Smile's third album, Cutouts, is out today on XL Recordings, nine months after Wall of Eyes and made in the same sessions. Sam Petts-Davies produced it in Oxford and at Abbey Road Studios, the London Contemporary Orchestra plays the strings, and Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke painted the cover while the band were recording.

“Eyes & Mouth” is older than the band. Jonny Greenwood first played its riff on stage with Radiohead in 2016, in the breakdown of “Talk Show Host”, and it was in The Smile's first performance, the eight-song set filmed for Glastonbury's Live at Worthy Farm stream in May 2021, listed then as “Just Eyes and Mouth”. It later dropped out of the live set. On the album it has lost the Rhodes piano heard on stage and gained a new bass line and hushed choral voices.

“Colours Fly” and “Bodies Laughing” also go back to the band's earlier gigs, while “Zero Sum” and “Instant Psalm” were first played on the opening night of the spring tour, in Dublin on 7 March. On the record “Instant Psalm” trades the electric guitars and saxophone of the live version for Greenwood's strings and Yorke's acoustic guitar. “Foreign Spies” and “No Words” are new.

“Don't Get Me Started” and “The Slip” came first, on a limited two-track 12-inch in early August. The album was announced on 28 August with “Foreign Spies” and “Zero Sum”, and Rolling Stone reported that the title comes from a line in “Zero Sum”.

There are no Smile shows to go with it. The August European dates were cancelled in July when Greenwood was taken into hospital with a serious infection, and Yorke's solo tour opens in Christchurch on 23 October.

Ryan Reed grades it A- in The A.V. Club and calls it possibly the most fun record Yorke has made. For him it is the second half of one recording project cut in two, as Amnesiac was to Kid A.

Tracklist