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Rating: 2024 has definitely started with a bang, with a magnificent album: "Wall of Eyes", the highly anticipated second album by The Smile, the project featuring Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood from Radiohead, from whom they inherit a good portion of their sound. Honestly, I find it hard to spot the differences between this new project and the mother band, even though I somehow know there are indeed differences—it might require a more in-depth analysis for me to identify them, but for now, it's easier for me to point out the similarities. From Thom's deliberately whining vocals (which we love as they are) to the electroacoustic combinations serving melodramatic and subtle music, leading to tangible and sick experimentation.
In fact, I have to say that this second work is even more Radiohead-esque than the first. The first was perhaps more rock, with an extra dose of energy, aiming to offer a slightly more carefree version of Radiohead. Here, instead, delicacy combined with experimentation prevails, with acoustic caresses and barely nudged guitars, dramatic and deliberately understated strings, gentle rhythms. And then the choice to extend the tracks just enough, without overdoing it (only one reaches 8 minutes), subtly breaking the 5-minute wall, sufficient to transform the tracks into hypnotic and elongated lullabies; if 8 tracks may seem few for a band not precisely classifiable under prog, listening disproves everything, because in those 8 tracks they give their best—it’s a relatively short but exhaustive album. The album presents itself as a sad and whining lullaby, also capable of transporting the more attentive and visionary listener’s mind.
When I hear the acoustic strings barely brushing and swaying and the percussion mildly showing up, the strings suddenly screeching, the winds whimpering, I immediately think that we are in the presence of a kind of Europeanized bossa nova forcibly placed into an indie/alternative circuit, with absolutely stunning results. These are more or less the coordinates that make tracks like the title track, "I Quit", or "Teleharmonic" grandiose. In "Friend of a Friend", instead, one encounters a kind of melancholic and slightly distressing jazz. The only more rock moments that seem to stem from the previous album are "Read the Room" and the following "Under Our Pillows", where the electric phrasings construct a sort of precise and flowing math-rock but not overly so.
An overall more mature and less immediate album than its predecessor, released in January, has opened the year excellently, and can rightly boast the title of "gateway" in a year that has already too quickly reached its midpoint.
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