The Smile's Wall of Eyes is out, with Best New Music from Pitchfork

Wall of Eyes, the second album by The Smile, is out on XL Recordings. Jazz Monroe gave it 8.5 and Best New Music in Pitchfork the day before release, and rates Jonny Greenwood's playing the most exciting and unpredictable he has done since In Rainbows.

The Smile are Greenwood and Thom Yorke of Radiohead with Tom Skinner, the drummer from Sons of Kemet. Sam Petts-Davies, who co-produced Yorke's Suspiria soundtrack, produced and mixed the record, made in Oxford and at Abbey Road, taking over from Nigel Godrich, who made the debut. Les Inrocks calls a record made without Godrich, for anything Yorke is part of, close to heresy.

There are eight songs in about 45 minutes, and only “Friend of a Friend”, whose Paul Thomas Anderson video went online on Thursday, runs under five. That song goes back to lockdown footage of Italians singing together from their balconies, and its coda asks where all the money went, which Monroe takes as a jab at pandemic cronyism. Jon Pareles, making the album a Critic's Pick in The New York Times, counts the London Contemporary Orchestra's strings on half the songs. Pete Wareham adds flute to “Teleharmonic”, first heard in the last episode of Peaky Blinders in 2022.

Almost every critic stopped at “Bending Hectic”, the eight-minute song in which Yorke's driver takes a car round the hairpin bends of an Italian mountain road and lets go of the wheel, before strings and distorted guitar break over it. The band first played it at Montreux in July 2022, with words Yorke said he had written half an hour before, and it came out as a single last June. For Jon Dolan in Rolling Stone it is the record's emotional peak, its climax some of the heaviest noise Greenwood has made.

Marko Djurdjic in Exclaim! calls it a comedown after the debut, too jammy and too little edited. Grayson Haver Currin at NPR Music names “Bending Hectic” the record's high point but argues that Yorke's voice, less adaptable than it was, keeps The Smile tied to Radiohead, and that what sets the band apart is Tom Skinner.

The first week's reviews