Critics rate The Smile's Cutouts from three out of five to full marks

Pitchfork has given The Smile's Cutouts 8.0, six days after the album came out on XL.

Sam Walton, giving it 8/10 in Loud And Quiet, dates some of these songs back years. The title and words of the closer, “Bodies Laughing”, first appeared in a 2005 post by Ed O'Brien on Radiohead's website, and Thom Yorke was filmed playing the intro of “Tiptoe” before the band's Tiny Desk session in 2022. The Smile first played “Bodies Laughing” at the Tempodrom in Berlin on 20 May 2022, the day after it was written. Zach Schonfeld, reviewing it for Pitchfork, adds that the opener, “Foreign Spies”, reworks parts of Horror vacui, Jonny Greenwood's orchestral piece of 2019, and ties the Egyptian scales of “Colours Fly” to Greenwood's work with the Israeli musician Dudu Tassa.

Chris DeVille, writing in Stereogum before release, has played “Zero Sum” more than any other Smile song, and Schonfeld likens Greenwood's playing on it to Buckethead auditioning for Lightning Bolt.

“Tiptoe”, a piano ballad with strings by the London Contemporary Orchestra, is the slow song several single out, though DeVille finds it beautiful but static. The two slow songs that open the record, “Foreign Spies” and “Instant Psalm”, split them. DeVille calls “Foreign Spies” a drag, and Konstantinos Pappis of Our Culture agrees; Walton calls it gorgeous.

Schonfeld rates Cutouts looser and funkier than Wall of Eyes and credits the chemistry two years of touring have built in the trio. The only weak tracks, for him, are the ones that sideline the drummer, Tom Skinner. Langdon Hickman goes further in Treble, calling Skinner the best drummer Yorke and Greenwood have played with, with an apology to Phil Selway.

Ed Lawson gives the lowest score, in DIY, calling Cutouts more of the same, with hooks only in the last two tracks, “No Words” and “Bodies Laughing”. DeVille, who wishes Nigel Godrich were back behind the desk, still thinks the two 2024 albums justify being released separately.

The precedent several of them reach for is Kid A and Amnesiac, two albums from one set of sessions released months apart. Schonfeld goes back to an old wish of Greenwood's, who has called himself the most impatient member of Radiohead, that the band's records were 90 percent as good, but come out twice as often¹⁵.

The scores