All emerging artists must pass a test that never really goes away: Can you continue to evolve or will you finally lose the long race against creative stagnation? I often think of fresh inspiration as being largely individual work, imagining an artist drawing within to discover something new. Maybe sometimes, though, that inspiration comes from another person. And maybe sometimes it comes when you start a side project with that person even though you are one of the foremost commercial successes of your generation and they are not. That is why, after listening to their new album “Wall of Eyes,” I find “The Smile” (a collaboration between Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead and Tom Skinner, a relatively unknown jazz musician) so interesting.
Radiohead is a band that, in a career now spanning three decades of commercial success, has managed to stay fresh, relevant and inspired. They’ve passed the test with flying colors and have been doing so over and over again for many years. Having started out fairly rooted in the world of 90s alt-rock, Radiohead pushed their boundaries with the critically successful album “OK Computer”, in which they used distorted sounds and reverberation to create the kind of sound appropriate for an album about a technological and commercial hellscape. In their next album “Kid A”, they lean further into experimentation by fully incorporating electronica into their production. I imagine that the development of each album starts with them sitting down and simply asking, “What can we do now that sounds cool?”
This is where “The Smile” comes in. Instantly, it’s clear that Yorke, Greenwood and Skinner have no intention to operate within the clean, well-defined lines of genre labels. The title track starts the album off with a soft acoustic guitar riff, which gives you the feeling that you should be reading a book in a cozy cafe. Quickly, though, the track is overlaid with a high-pitched siren-like noise, distorted audio that sounds like explosions in the distance and discordant piano which makes the track feel just as atmospheric and eerie as calm and peaceful. This playful blending of sounds characterizes the whole album.
To my surprise, despite the genre-bending nature of the album, I frequently found myself asking, “why does this sound kind of like jazz?” The answer to that question is because of Tom Skinner. The only member of the trio who’s not in Radiohead, Skinner was first in a jazz quartet called Sons of Kemet. His influence on the band is obvious. The clarinet, saxophone and flute are each used at different points on the album in jazz-inspired compositions. Jazz is such an essential ingredient to what “The Smile” is doing that their only live album so far is from the Montreux Jazz Festival.
Nevertheless, “Wall of Eyes” still sounds distinctly like Radiohead—just not any Radiohead you’ve heard before. Yorke and Greenwood leverage their extensive experience with electronica-infused rock to full effect. Each track plays with instrumentation and production in unique ways, no track combining influences in quite the same way. I’m not a musician so I can’t say how this all works, but I can say that it sounds cool.
Yorke, Greenwood and Skinner have collectively agreed not to do interviews on “The Smile,” so we may never know firsthand what inspired the side project, but we do know how the band formed—and maybe through that, we can piece together why.
Greenwood, who’s done solo work scoring films, worked with Skinner for the first time when he brought him to work on a movie soundtrack. I’d like to think that a mutual respect for one another as artists grew at that point, a sentiment which expanded to include Yorke. Then, through that respect, “The Smile” was born—not because Skinner offered them anything commercially (What could he offer them commercially that they didn’t already have?)—but because he offered them the opportunity to create something new. Something that sounds cool. At least, that’s how I imagine it happened and I have a hunch that I’m right.
To me, “Walls of Eyes” represents a road less traveled when it comes to evolution as an artist. Great musical collaborations can happen when artists operating in the same sphere work together (“Kids See Ghosts”, a Kanye West and Kid Cudi project, is a good example of this). But, I think, this has limited potential for the artists to broaden their own horizons. If more commercially successful artists were willing to work with people outside of their sphere, simply because they offered them something new creatively, maybe fewer artists would fall prey to the stagnation trap.
In an interview with The Guardian, Yorke said, “I think artists can influence only through making music that challenges people, excites them and flips them out. Music that repeats what you know in ever-decreasing derivation, that’s unchallenging and unstimulating, deadens our minds, our imagination and our ability to see beyond the hell we find ourselves in.” Yorke, Greenwood and Skinner have all more than proven their commitment to avoiding music that only repeats what they know. They made electronic rock jazz instead.