The Smile's Latest Album Pushes Radiohead's Legacy in New Directions

The Smile, the project that reunites Radiohead's Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with jazz drummer Tom Skinner, has released its most ambitious album yet, a work that pushes the boundaries of what rock music can encompass while maintaining the emotional resonance that has always been at the heart of Yorke and Greenwood's creative partnership.

The album is structured as a continuous piece of music, with tracks bleeding into one another to create an uninterrupted listening experience. This format demands and rewards sustained attention, revealing its complexities gradually over repeated listens. Motifs introduced early reappear in transformed versions later, and the overall trajectory moves from fragmented anxiety to something approaching, if not quite reaching, resolution.

Greenwood's guitar and keyboard work is extraordinary, moving fluidly between avant-garde noise, tender melody, and rhythmic patterns that lock in with Skinner's ever-shifting drumming. Yorke's voice, meanwhile, has rarely sounded more expressive, shifting from intimate whisper to full-throated cry as the emotional demands of each passage require.

For fans who have followed Yorke and Greenwood's work across decades, the album represents a continuation of their restless creative evolution. For newcomers, it serves as an entry point into a body of work that prioritizes artistic ambition over commercial safety. In either case, it's one of the year's most rewarding listening experiences.