One of the few good things to come out of the COVID-19 pandemic is that while the world was severely locked down, primary Radiohead members Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood opted to take their quarantine time to craft a whole album of material and subsequently prepped it into a whole new band with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner. The band was named, simply enough, The Smile. This project, differing greatly from Radiohead and the other side project ultimately dubbed Atoms For Peace, born of Thom Yorke’s solo albums, came on the heels of a longer hiatus in Radiohead’s recorded output than usual. Truly, the band has had no progress on new music since their 2016 release, A Moon Shaped Pool.

All photos by Raymond Flotat

Now Radiohead’s brilliance is beyond question, but depending on whom you ask, different people left the bus the further the band went into their catalog. The band was determined to reinvent and restyle themselves with each release. The further they went from their seminal 2007 work, In Rainbows, the less excited fans seemed to be about the much-heralded champions of the indie rock explosion of the 2000s. The Smile’s release this year, A Light for Attracting Attention, seemed to immediately deliver on its title’s promise: showing the world there are millions still hungry for what the players from Radiohead are capable of and to see them live.

On a December night in Los Angeles, the band played the second of a two-night stand at the famed Shrine Auditorium. Just standing in the venue, there was a palpable excitement apparent from the crowd on hand. The mere sight of Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood arriving on stage was greeted with enthusiastic screams. The show started with a slower intro, album opener “The Same,” where Yorke quietly emotes over the staccato keyboard and guitar notes until the arrangements bloom into full cacophony. From there, the fuller arrangement would arrive and Yorke and Greenwood would change off on whom was playing guitar, bass or keyboards in almost every song. “Thin Thing” and “The Opposite” featured tons of Greenwood’s penchant for arpeggiated melodies, each framework, a computer-like patchwork of notes snaking into one chord after another until the songs would evolve into their own form of jazz freakouts. Greenwood, like Yorke’s vocals, never aimed to show off in any obvious way. They have the ability to do so if they want to, but they choose otherwise. The emphasis here was tight song construction, and as muscular a performance as any player could hope to emanate.

“Speech Bubbles” was a quieter timbre compared to most of the evening’s songs but still evolved into its own form of orchestral-style swell. “A Hairdryer” took one of the night’s many prog-tastic turns with slower chord melodies and frenetic hi-hat/cymbal work from Skinner. The song’s drone-y outro was kept in place for the same segue that worked on their debut album, going straight into the more ominous keyboard-driven “Waving a White Flag.” A few songs not yet released in any conventional format (though played live at many shows thus far) were also played beyond the album tracks, including “Colors Fly” and “Read the Room.” Each impressively showed the band doubling down on their already intricate delivery with even more complex songcraft. “Read the Room” especially was explosive and generated a strong response from the crowd. In that same fashion, keyboard tones and driving bass work on “We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings” made for one of the most rocking tracks of the evening, a crescendo song that seemed to dare each successive twenty seconds to find even bigger crescendos. Elsewhere “Skrting on the Surface” allowed in some small measure for some saxophone work from opener Robert Stillman.

As the set proper approached its conclusion, it became apparent for anyone hoping otherwise that there would be no Radiohead covers in this show, and the band brought forth the unusual “Pana-Vision.” “The Smoke” illuminated so much of the joy in this project, as its plucky, sidewinding bassline depicted how this was a song fully jammed out by crack musicians. So much of everything in this show veers towards an “anything goes” approach, littered with hard edges. It was powerfully evident in these moments that Yorke and Greenwood were going here in The Smile, where they may no longer be able to go with their other Radiohead bandmates, opting for the freedom of impulse than any notion of brand identity correctness. The bratty racket of “You Will Never Work in Television Again” ended the set properly.

The band’s encore consisted of three vastly different choices. First, the King Crimson-esque quietude of “Open the Floodgates.” After that, the show should’ve ended on “Bending Hectic.” “Bending Hectic” is a song the band has worked out since A Light for Attracting Attention was completed, and boy, it’s a doozy. As opposed to the slower build-up much of the band’s material has been crafted to utilize, “Bending Hectic” goes for the gold with a doom metal distortion left turn and a somber set of coos from Yorke as Greenwood hammers out nasty guitar licks. The only choice that could be described as less than brilliant was the night’s sole cover, “FeelingPulledApartByHorses,” going back to Thom Yorke’s earlier solo work with Nigel Godrich. Nothing wrong with it, but it lacked the climactic catharsis “Bending Hectic” did just minutes earlier.

This show was special to see as a fan, and most likely for any aspiring musician, as it showed the full power of an uncompromised vision when handled by players with incredible skill. It may have disappointed some seeking a taste of the existentialist crisis set to the beauty Radiohead always embodied with their music, but artists like Yorke and Greenwood know exactly what they’re doing here. This was diving straight to the dark heart of darkness, mining the depths of each new turn without worry that songs would need to chart or cause a tour to sell out. This was art for the art’s sake alone. It’s a rare thing for any players to have the freedom and power to make such a move, but there are probably few other players in the world that could go for such high-minded fare and rightfully expect with confidence that the fans should follow them wherever they ended up going.

– Setlist
The Same
Thin Thing
The Opposite
Speech Bubbles
A Hairdryer
Waving a White Flag
Colours Fly
We Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings
Under Our Pillows
Teleharmonic
Skrting on the Surface
Read the Room
Pana-Vision
The Smoke
You Will Never Work in Television Again

Encore:
Open the Floodgates
Bending Hectic
Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses (Thom Yorke song)

All photos by Raymond Flotat