Jonny Greenwood has been putting out a ton of music recently, but as it turns out, the stuff we’ve heard is only the tip of the iceberg. Just over a year after Radiohead offshoot project The Smile shared their great debut album A Light for Attracting Attention, the musician revealed in an upcoming interview with Consequence that he and his bandmates Thom Yorke and Tom Skinner are still sitting on a “big backlog of ideas.”
“The frustration of having not had access to playing in a band for a couple of years [has] just built up a big backlog of ideas,” Greenwood said, alluding to the pandemic that essentially halted every band on earth. “We’re still firing off each other, and it feels productive. So, while that’s happening, we just wanna keep moving forward, I think.”
And it sure seems like The Smile are moving forward, indeed, having casually revealed in a March newsletter that they were seven weeks into recording their sophomore album. Greenwood added that the new music is “pretty similar” to what fans heard on A Light for Attracting Attention.
“We were doing a lot of the songs live, and we’ve made some faithful recordings of those,” he went on. “I think [the record is about] the whole dynamic of three people and the limits that you have… and trying to enjoy that and work within them.”
Greenwood also recently put out a collaborative album called Jarak Qaribak with Israeli musician Dudu Tassa, as well as a new single with The Pretenders called “I Think About You Daily.” As for The Smile, the trio is about to kick off a new run of North American tour dates; tickets are available here.