A Black Hole At The Center Of The Galaxy

The Smile “The Slip”

It’s unfortunate that The Smile records have to carry the weight of questions like “wait, is there never going to be another Radiohead album?” and “hold on, so is this basically Radiohead from now on?” But what can you do? Those are big questions for anyone who’d want to listen to this music, and as of The Smile’s third album, the answers seem to be “who knows?” and “kinda, yeah.” You kinda have to work through a few layers of confusion and disappointment to hear the music on its own terms.

As I’ve written before, it’s clear to me that a lot of the appeal of The Smile for Thom Yorke and especially Jonny Greenwood is in getting to indulge in formal experiments without the weight of Radiohead expectations bearing down on them. At the start, it was a way for Thom and Jonny to explore playing bass guitar without having to sideline or reassign Jonny’s own brother Colin. Now it’s Jonny playing around with the possibilities of playing guitar only with a delay pedal. Like a lot of artists, particularly lifelong artists, they’re enjoying self-imposed limitations.

And then there’s the most obvious difference between The Smile and Radiohead – “small teams move more quickly,” as Jonny recently put it speaking to the NME. They can work fast, and they don’t have to mobilize as many forces to release a record or do a tour. Radiohead is a barge, The Smile is a speedboat. If you’re looking at this from the perspective of now grizzled veteran musicians who don’t necessarily need a lot of money, which setup do you think is more enticing?

But still, the context is the context, and the success of The Smile songs come down to “is this up to the standards of Radiohead song, as opposed to solo record quality?” I’d say the trio’s output is about half and half, and “The Slip” is in the “good enough to be Radiohead” bucket. It’s a pretty groovy one, and though it starts out in Thom Yorke synth-centric solo project mode, it ends up moving towards a more Jonny-centric guitar section that feels like a cousin to “Just.”

A lot of the appeal is just hearing Thom be so Thom and Jonny be so Jonny, and how their instincts overlap or gel. This is kinda how it goes when you follow artists for a long time – even if some of the songs are exceptionally good, I’m not coming to this expecting to have my mind blown. I just want to check in with these guys on their journey.

Buy it from Bandcamp.