TO throw out a spoiler right away: we learn from Greenwood that The Smile first rehearsed back in 2018, and thus had a longer lead time than expected. He asked jazz drummer Tom Skinner of the now just discontinued Sons Of Kemet for a joint session to try out some ideas. Those became several fruitful sessions: when Thom Yorke was asked to join, the two already had four tracks finished, just no singer yet. During the Covid period, there was time to spare and the project went flying. The Smile actually sounds exactly as you would expect based on the individual band members: like a stripped-down version of Radiohead with an incredibly swinging and creative drummer. The three clearly enjoy playing live and enjoy challenging each other musically on stage. That the stock of songs was already very large when A Light For Attracting Attention was released can be seen nicely in retrospect in concert setlists. During the Dutch stage debut in Paradiso on May 27, 2022, Bodies Laughing and Eyes & Mouth were already played from Cutouts. Those two also passed at Down The Rabbit Hole in July that year, as did Colours Fly. Last March, The Smile played their tentative last show on Dutch soil at AFAS Live, where Instant Psalm kicked off. The trio was also scheduled to play at Lowlands, but in July Jonny Greenwood ended up in intensive care with a serious infection, after which the rest of the tour was canceled.

BUT THERE IS to third album, Cutouts. Largely recorded during the sessions for Wall Of Eyes in the first months of 2023 at Abbey Road studios, "and at Oxford," which will be Greenwood's home studio. So all the basic info for both records is the same: the producer is Sam Petts-Davies, who was already involved with Radiohead as an engineer and produced solo records by Thom Yorke. Fine orchestration can be heard from the London Contemporary Orchestra. The cover was painted during the recording process by Yorke along with Stanley Donwood, whom OOR spoke to earlier this year about their work together.

And then suddenly there was an interview opportunity. The band members would be willing to answer questions by email, if the questions were of a certain level. And: the questions were to be exclusively about The Smile; questions about Yorke and Greenwood's other band were out of the question. Who would answer them and whether they would be answered at all? Wait and see. Circumstantial? Definitely. Zero interaction and no possibility of follow-up questions. On the other hand: musicians of this caliber obviously don't have to do this at all for a relatively small country like the Netherlands. So OOR took the bait. And on a Thursday evening we got the green light that we were among the happy few. Whether the questions could be forwarded on Friday morning. That turned into a very short night.

AGAINST the fact that no serious interviews at all have yet been given by The Smile, I decide to start with fairly general questions about the band, which any band member could answer. I also have some solid questions about the lyrics and my interpretation of them, with which I hope to mail Thom Yorke out of his booth.

Cutouts strikes me as an extremely political record that has a lot to do with the power of populism, as Meindert Talma calls it. About wandering souls caught up in it and getting lost in a world of fake news, distrust of everything and xenophobia. The album title comes from Zero Sum: "A cutout trying to fill the void, a shit grin, a performance. Is that perhaps a cheap politician promising golden mountains? Cutouts are also discounted LPs with a corner cut out. Zero Sum is an English expression meaning that gain for one party is always loss for the other. I think I have it pretty much figured out.

Then editor-in-chief Koen Poolman emails. He thinks he sees two moons in the painting on the album cover, which reminds him of Haruki Murakami's famous novel 1q84. In it, the double moon symbolizes a parallel dream world in which reality and fiction intertwine but never really converge: it is a world in which 'the other' always remains unattainable. Of course, I think, polarization! Two worlds that can no longer reach each other, which is completely in line with what I had already thought. Moreover, Yorke's lyrics on Radiohead fan blogs are more often associated with Murakami. Fortunately, the next morning Koen comes up with a more romantic explanation of 1q84 (about the path of lovers Aomame and Tengo that just won't cross; she retreats into her dream world, he wanders helplessly through reality), because my most direct questions about the (political?) lyrics will not be answered.

HERE'S JONNY! After a week of waiting, there is white smoke shortly before our deadline. Jonny Greenwood sat down for it and this is the result, uncut.

Thanks for being willing to do this. Jonny, I hope you're back to full health by now.

‘Thanks - I'm ninety percent back to normal. In a few months I should be completely fine again.’

Did you ever think you would release a third album when you were working on A Light For Attracting Attention?

‘There was a lot of pent-up creativity in the band then, and that feeling has remained. Plus, we had our first rehearsal as a trio back in 2018, so it built up slowly but very decisively.’

Can you pinpoint a moment when The Smile changed from a "project" to a real band, which will continue to exist as long as there is enough creativity?

‘Maybe that was during the first tour in 2022. We had a so-called warm-up room backstage. That really became the place to write and play new stuff all day, instead of just warming up right before the show. It's kind of an adolescent fantasy: a room with drums and guitars - why wouldn't you want to be there all the time? We're VERY lucky, aren't we?

HOW HAS touring after the first album influenced the writing and recording of Wall Of Eyes and Cutouts? Can you describe the band's musical development?

'We learned to work fast. Radiohead is undoubtedly a great band, but working as a trio is faster; it feels like a lighter beast, able to move faster. By that I'm definitely not saying it's a better band, but a very another band.’

How important is improvisation during the songwriting process? Have any songs been created entirely from jamming?

‘None of the songs originated from a jam. Personally, I never believed in jamming - it smacks of bad blues guitar solos and self-righteous exhibitionism. Know what I mean? Unless you're a jazz musician. staying home and writing something for tomorrow's rehearsal is actually a motivation. For me, anyway, it is.’

You told the NME in 2021 that you prefer to release as many albums as possible: 'I've always said I'd rather make records that are ninety percent as good, but come out twice as often.’ Has that become The Smile's method? Not overthinking it?

‘What I was getting at was: the longer you work on something, the smaller the improvements are usually still. Fortunately, there are exceptions: sometimes you achieve a breakthrough after months of tinkering with a piece of music of a few minutes. But personally, I usually start getting excited about the next project while still in the middle of the current one. My ability to concentrate is limited. Thom and Tom are much better at this than I am!’

Are there any typical Tom, Thom or Jonny songs?

‘I think we influence each other so much that it is increasingly difficult to say. And that's the way it should be. Thom and Tom are both very inspiring musicians. Since I can't sing, nothing really gets off the ground until Thom is involved in something. Or Tom with his fascinating rhythms. So until we decide to make half an album of drumless instrumentals, I wouldn't dare claim any of the pieces as my songs.’

As I understand Wall Of Eyes and Cutouts were largely recorded during the same sessions last year?

‘That's right. We were on a roll and kept going.’

Were all the Cutouts songs completely finished last year? And how did you distribute the songs; do both albums represent a specific mood or story?

'No, we still had to finish some Cutouts songs when Wall Of Eyes came out. But yes, those two records together are actually one unit. Cutouts simply contains the songs we finished a little later, even though some of them were quite old.'

Do Bodies Laughing and the song Wall Of Eyes have anything to do with each other? They feel related because of the Spanish guitar and a similar, loose groove.

‘It seems we finally fell for nylon-string guitars, something I always feared. But if 't was good enough for Scott Walker ... I couldn't think of any other link between those songs than that. Thom plays it with his thumb - it's a very satisfying warm sound and rhythm.’

You have heard something I would call The Smile groove for the first time in The Opposite: a nervous but swinging rhythm, combined with frenetic guitar notes. Is there anything you yourself immediately identify musically as The Smile?

‘A lot of that came from realizing how great the idea of delay is. Sometimes I think technology evolves faster than creativity can keep up. There seems to be an idea among guitarists that something as remarkable as a box that creates a perfect echo is old, played out or overused. There are so many new sounds and effects, why not switch to them? Instead, I sat down for over a year with just a guitar, a delay pedal and a drum machine, and that's how I came up with many of the early Smile ideas. I'm not anti-progress: I'm enthusiastic about both old and new music technology, from old organs to the latest software. But I've found that it can work very creatively for me to study one thing closely for an extended period of time. And there is so much more to try, just with delays alone. It is a candy store for me, and I'm only at the first jar.’

Which Cutouts track was the most exciting to work on?

‘Probably Zero Sum. Great percussion and drums from Tom, great bass line and brass pieces from Thom. It was a joy to play along with that noise.’

About the cover: we spoke to artist Stanley Donwood earlier this year when he exhibited in the Netherlands. He talked about the “narrative landscapes” he creates with Thom for the covers of The Smile. What is the narrative of the Cutouts cover?

"Thom and Stanley set up a painting room in the Abbey Road studio when we recorded there last year. We got used to friendly shouted musical suggestions from Thom in the control room while he was painting. The idea was that the music influenced the painting and also vice versa. I don't know if it worked that way, but that was the idea.

Are we perhaps seeing two moons, as in Haruki Murakami's novel 1q84? As a representation of a parallel (dream) world in which the listener - and possibly musician - finds themselves, or withdraws, when experiencing the music? Is that the ultimate: creating a safe space away from the here and now?

"You should have asked Stanley that when you had the chance.' [When we spoke to Donwood, Cutouts had not yet been announced].

Connecting to this interpretation, what record did you spin gray as a young adolescent when you wanted to retreat and escape reality? Do you still feel the same now when you hear them back? Or is there only a way forward, into new safe spaces?

‘Mostly it was The Fall. Funny, I was listening to their album Extricate [1990] yesterday, and the song I'm Frank was and still is such emotional music for me. The whole album actually. All the Fall albums! And I fear I fit into the British tradition of people permanently stuck in their adolescence. I keep waiting for me to grow past it... It's going to happen any day now!’

CUTOUTS ARE discounted LPs with a corner taken out. Have you bought cutouts in the past that you cherish to this day?

"Yes. The routine during the first American Radiohead tours in the 1990s looked like this: check into the hotel, look up the nearest record stores in a Yellow Pages, and five minutes later hit the road. I looked for Blue Note records a lot back then: I was obsessed with people like Art Blakey and Lee Morgan, all that hard bop stuff. I also remember a great record store in Amsterdam-West that had an ondes-Martenot section [one of the earliest electronic instruments, Jonny has been using it regularly in Radiohead songs since Kid A, including How To Disappear Completely]. I couldn't believe it, that was unique.’

Are the 'cutouts' in the song Zero Sum cheap, populist leaders and politicians? 'A cutout trying to fill the void." And the recurring "Windows 95' - we go back in time.

‘When we recorded Zero Sum, we were watching the infamous Windows 95 launch video: Microsoft tech guys of a certain age dancing like savages. Those images seem to work extremely well with the song. For legal reasons, I hope no one comes up with the unholy idea of putting those images under our song and then distributing the video over the Internet.’

Can you say the album has an overarching theme? I read in it the story of two worlds that can hardly understand and reach each other anymore.

‘I can't speak for Thom, but the answer to this is fixed in one of the indecipherable notebooks he constantly fills with words and drawings. He is the kind of reader who underlines passages and makes annotations. I wish I had the patience for that.'

Do you think of themes you want to write about in advance?

‘Never. The songs are a document of the times, which will usually yield some kind of coherent theme. But I don't see how you could name that without using a calendar.'

This fall, Thom will play solo in Asia and Oceania. Will The Smile be touring again in 2025?

‘No idea. My period in the hospital messed up all the plans. For now, I'm just glad we made this album.’

THANKS, JONNY! That didn't disappoint. Here speaks clearly a, as he himself says, ‘eternal adolescent’ (Greenwood is 52), who is still obsessed with inventing instruments and making music. I think he may have deliberately misunderstood the question about the cover, but the "narrative" of the process of making the painting in the studio is also worthwhile. He ignored the suspected link with 1q84 and too substantive questions about the lyrics. Those were, of course, also meant for Thom Yorke. That his words can be interpreted in several ways is clear from Greenwood's answer about Zero Sum, from which I quoted earlier. I saw in it Nigel Farage-like populists who want to take us back in time.

‘So overconfident, that's another red flag.' The recurring "Windows 95" (old technology) confirms that image. But so the Windows 95 launch video was a literal inspiration for the text. Who doesn't know it: Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and a few other technerds go crazy to Start Me Up by The Rolling Stones. They charged an astronomical amount for use of the song, which to their surprise was simply paid for by Microsoft. Greenwood may be secretly hoping fans will turn it into an unofficial Zero Sum video; that could turn out hilarious.

Greenwood did not answer two questions at all. At first, I submit the tape's 1q84 explanation of Cutouts and link it to polarization: 'Is this parallel world perhaps the world of fake news and populist politicians? Two worlds coexist but can barely make contact, like Tengo and Aomame, the boy and girl in 1q84.' The second is about opening track Foreign Spies, a deceptively relaxed-sounding ballad, warmly tucked in by a lush synth part. That seems to me to be about xenophobia: "They're grabbing kitchen knives every time our backs are turned. I link that song to Colours Fly, which I think tells the other side of the story: that of the refugee and his reasons for fleeing. 'Circumstances change, let them colours fly.' And, "Mother starts to cry, and because we can't escape you're gonna say goodnight. On the run, he encounters little compassion and mercy. From Tiptoe: 'We are just baggage with no label, you will find us in the rubble / While you people tiptoe tiptoe, far away from the windows.’

So, according to Greenwood, whether or not I come close with my lyric analysis - which is not a hobby of mine - can be found in Yorke's "indecipherable notebooks’. In any case, the songs and their content are always a document of the time in which they were created, he argues. Yorke's lyrics often have a committed angle. I dare say my explanations are at least part of the story, though they may not be as unambiguous as I have made them out to be. Regardless, Cutouts has become yet another extraordinary record from Radiohead's creative core duo featuring a jazz-trained drummer, which has Yorke and Greenwood swinging more than ever. Speaking of the mothership, that too has been restarted. Bassist Colin Greenwood, Jonny's brother, told me recently that the band had practiced a few times in London, "just to play the old songs. Colin himself has his hands full for now with the tour with Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, in which he is temporarily replacing bassist Martyn P. Casey. Jonny's health problems sent The Smile plans into disarray, but they will want to at least make up for their missed dates next year. Plenty on the horizon. CUTOUTS was released on Oct. 4.