The newly-formed Radiohead spinoff band The Smile featuring Thom York, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner from Sons of Kemet kicked off their first tour on American soil last night (November 14) at the Veterans Memorial Auditorium in Providence, Rhode Island. They made their first appearance as The Smile at 2021’s Glastonbury Festival and followed that performance up with their debut single, the aggressive, fuzzed-out “You Will Never Work In Television Again”. This single landed on the band’s debut album, A Light for Attracting Attention, the band produced this album with the help of longtime Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich and was released to wide critical acclaim in May of this year. After touring around Europe for months after the album was released, the trio is bringing their kaleidoscope sound to the states for a long stint of North American shows.
With the album being so fresh, The Smile opted to add almost the entire album to their setlist with the exception of “Open the Floodgates”. What the band did with the rest of the setlist was very interesting, they very easily could have reached into Radiohead’s catalog and performed their plethora of classics, but that wouldn’t be very Thom Yorke of Thom Yorke. Instead, The Smile reached into a goodie bag of unreleased material and filled the setlist with songs they have only performed live. They performed 5 unreleased songs and while the band had been performing them on their European tour early this year, songs like “Bending Hectic” and “Just Eyes and Mouth” remain in the vault. The band closed out the show with a cover of Yorke’s “Feeling Pulled Apart by Horses”, a hectic single from 2009.
The Smile will continue bouncing from state to state on their tour of the U.S. with stops in major cities like Boston, Nashville, and Atlanta to name a few. They also have intentions to visit a little further north with stops in Quebec and Toronto before wrapping things up in late December with two shows in L.A.
Check out the full setlist, tour dates, and footage from last night’s show below:
Dates: https://www.thesmiletheband.com/live
