This one is for the Radiohead fans; Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Johnny Greenwood are joined by drummer Mike Skinner to form The Smile, an Art/Prog/Post-Rock side project. Wall of Eyes is the group’s sophomore album, following 2022’s A Light for Attracting Attention.
This album is a rather eclectic mix of Prog and Art Rock with heavy Post- and Experimental leanings. The first two tracks, title track “Wall of Eyes” and “Teleharmonic”, are wildly atmospheric and unstructured; the two tracks which immediately follow to round out the first half of Wall of Eyes, “Read the Room” and “Under Our Pillows”, are more technical rockers suitable for hipster dive cafes – that is to say, they aren’t particularly heavy, just upbeat and really lost in the intricacies of the jams that they want to be.
And then “Under Our Pillows” wraps by fading into atmospheric distortions which distort further into noise.
The second half of the album is much the same, except now it’s really rolling. “Friend of a Friend”, “I Quit”, and “Bending Heretic” form the strongest section of the album, with the album’s only heavy moment also falling in the last two minutes of the eight-minute-long “Bending Heretic”. That song is, otherwise, dominated by discordance and the feeling that something just isn’t right.
Overall, it’s a decent album. There are no bad songs, but also not a lot really sticks out, either, despite the broad stylistic flexibility present. It’s one of those instances where it feels like the band was trying too hard to do something interesting and sort of overlooked whether the interesting was wholly enjoyable.
Rating: Green