Cutouts

Cutouts feels less like an In Rainbows Disc 2 than an Amnesiac—the resolution of one mammoth, chopped-in-half recording project. Also crucial: It could be their most colorful and complete piece of work.

This band is having a ball, that much is plain. It’s a danceable album, upbeat in tone basically all the way through. On ‘Zero Sum’ especially, it all starts to pop off – savour the evergreen treat that is Thom Yorke being a snarky little so-and-so over a raging fucking bop. You love to see it. The slow number, ‘Tiptoe’, is absolutely gorgeous.

Many bands would be overjoyed to have accomplished an album as solidly satisfying as this collection of offcuts. Where the vault-clearing exercise of Cutouts leaves The Smile is unclear, however.

Cutouts is an exciting milestone for The Smile, showcasing a new ability to create a unified and emotionally rich album, while still drawing on the creative fertility and spontaneity fans have come to expect from this most productive of Yorke’s projects.

I do know that there’s a lot to love about Cutouts, and it’s certainly a more substantive release than its title might suggest — that these are the cutting room–floor tracks from the Wall of Eyes sessions. Far from it: overall, this is a more colorful and dynamic record.

Compared with its predecessor, Cutouts is looser, funkier—a thrilling testament to the near-telepathic chemistry these three musicians have honed across two years of touring.

While the album’s name and vintage of some of the tracks suggests a clearing of the decks, Cutouts is too cohesive, energetic and imaginative to feel like a mere odds’n’sods collection. Our beautiful world may well be melting, but at least The Smile are providing a fitting soundtrack. [Nov 2024, p.99]

The punchy The Slip aside, none of these intricately crafted songs is particularly immediate, but repeated listening allows each to reveal its charms.

An unexpected beauty. [Nov 2024, p.84]

Cutouts feels a little like the cheeky younger sister of Wall of Eyes. The arrangements on that second album skewed traditional; more sombre and vulnerable in tone. Here, there’s a newfound vibrancy perhaps taking cues from Skinner’s jazz background.

The outpouring of creativity is exciting: but where this clearing-out of the songwriting archives leaves The Smile now is anyone’s guess.

Eschewing any grand, overarching statement, The Smile sound – whisper it – quite comfortable within what is now their established aesthetic.

With the sum of the trio’s musical parts now known, and this quite literally coming from the same sessions as their previous, to summarise ‘Cutouts’ as more of the same might seem a tad obvious a statement to make, but it’s just about the most accurate.

If there's any bone to pick, it's that some of the slower, more atmospheric numbers don't quite gel as well as the rest of the tracks. Still, the high points make Cutouts every bit as worthy of devoted listening as the first two Smile albums.

Like the Smile’s past albums, Cutouts maintains a healthy balance between its numerous styles—and between feeling like a Thom Yorke solo project and the work of a proper band in the way that Atoms for Peace’s Amok never did.