Attention Radiohead and Sons of Kemet fans - The Smile are back with their new standalone single Bending Hectic.
Fronted by Radiohead’s vocalist Thom Yorke, The Smile also features his bandmate, guitarist Jonny Greenwood, while Tom Skinner, the drummer in Mercury Prize-nominated contemporary jazz group Sons of Kemet, completes the trio.
The new track, which hums with rich string arrangements from the London Contemporary Orchestra, was recorded at the beyond-iconic Abbey Road Studios earlier this year, and is produced by Warpaint and Puma Blue producer Sam Petts-Davies. He previously collaborated with Yorke on his score for Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 supernatural horror Suspiria.
An eight-minute epic, Bending Hectic certainly has a cinematic, score-like quality as it rises up from gently picked, string-bending melodies to the sort of thrashing, reverb-laden rock that coursed through Radiohead’s 1995 album The Bends.
Already a live favourite at The Smile shows, the song first debuted at last year’s Montreux Jazz Festival. Charting a sprawling journey around winding, mountainside roads, Yorke’s lyrics reflect on teetering on the edge of losing control. “We’re coming to a bend now/Skidding ‘round the hairpin/A sheer drop down/An Italian mountainside,” he sings, as an orchestra bursts into life alongside Skinner’s restless, jazz-inflected beats. Then, roughly six minutes in, chaos finally descends in a surge of white noise.
It’s The Smile’s first new material since the release of their 2022 debut album A Light For Attracting Attention – one of the Evening Standard’s albums of the year. “[It] sounded like the closest we’ll get to a new Radiohead album for a long while, as a dense, fascinating collaboration led by Thom Yorke, guitarist Jonny Greenwood and long-term producer Nigel Godrich,” we wrote.
“Comparisons to Radiohead will be inevitable and the material sits somewhere between the uneasy dystopia of Hail to the Thief and the hopeful beauty of In Rainbows,” we said of their Greenwich gig last year, which saw the band performing from within a gigantic, circular structure lit with neon strips.
Radiohead released their last album, A Moon Shaped Pool, back in 2016; Yorke has branched off into everything from solo records to film scores, and is also part of Atoms For Peace with Nigel Godrich. Sons of Kemet‘s most recent album Black to the Future came out in 2021. Earlier this year, Greenwood released collaborative album Jarak Qaribak – an album of Middle Eastern love songs – alongside Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, and was nominated for an Oscar for his original score for The Power of the Dog in 2021.
Though Bending Hectic is a standalone effort from The Smile, the band will regroup to work on further new material following their North American tour, which kicks off in New York on June 21.
Listen to the new single below.
