Back in May 2021,Radiohead masterminds Thom Yorke andJonny Greenwoodsurprise-debuted The Smile, a new project with bolder guitar leanings than their day jobs. Completed by Tom Skinner, drummer for London jazz outfit Sons of Kemet, the trio made their debut via a Glastonbury livestream, held in place of the actual festival.

This weekend, the group played their first gigs in front of actual human beings. The ambitious setup saw the band perform three shows in the round, all within the space of 15 hours to allow for livestreams of the concerts across three time zones.

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1. The Smile are unashamedly prog

Radiohead are perhaps the ultimate ‘stealth’ prog band, consistently pushing their sound but without delvingtoo far into progressive excess. But The Smile don’t hold back.

The time signatures are evidence enough: from the second Yorke launched into the uneasy piano tinklings of 7/8 openerPanavision, the evening only occasionally ventured into 4/4 – hell, the band’s big ‘single’, the Sonic Youth-flavoredYou Will Never Work in Television Again, is in 5/4, and there were two songs in the rather more challenging 11/8: the eerieWaving a White Flag and unreleased Radiohead reworkingSkirting on the Surface.

In part, the band’s penchant for off-kilter grooves could be attributed to Skinner’s fluid drumming, but there’s also the notion that with fewer moving parts to manage, Yorke and Greenwood are able to span a wider array of times, tones and textures themselves. Certainly, there were few sonic landscapes left unpainted by the trio and the monumental array of gear they’d brought with them. Which brings us to…

2. Jonny Greenwood is really into rhythmic delays now

The manic outro of Radiohead’sIdentikit was something of a precursor to this particular development, but The Smile’s debut performance confirmed that closely sync’ddelay pedals are very much Greenwood’s guitar sound du jour.

There was the tight slapback of Greenwood’s, erm, slappedLes Paul riff that drivesThin Thing,Open the Floodgates’ dreamy cascading repeats and the skronky, angular echoes ofThe Opposite. With the wrongpedalboard, set closerJust Eyes and Mouthcould be mistaken for a pentatonic scale exercise, but a shower of dotted-eighth repeats lent it an altogether more ethereal quality.

Interestingly enough, while Greenwood had beenspotted with a Strymon TimeLine in rehearsals, he opted for aBoss RE-20 and DD-200 for the live shows. Oh, and he played sans shoes all evening. Toes of steel, that man.

3. Thom Yorke is a mean fingerstyle bass player

The Smile’s trio format finds both Yorke and Greenwood alternating between bass and guitar, but they each have very different approaches to the four-string.

• Inside the (literally) blistering sound of British alt-rock’s cultest heroes, The Wedding Present
• Biffy Clyro’s Simon Neil on why he fell in love with Kirk Hammett’s Greeny – even if he’s still Team Strat
• The Cribs on swapping guitars, tracking a stolen guitar and why it’s not their fault that you can’t get their signature Squiers

When Greenwood donned his blonde P-Bass, he attacked it in a similar manner to his Telecaster Plus, with aggressive pick strokes and plenty of action at the upper end of the fretboard. Hell, he even whipped out the ol’ violin bow for A Hairdryer’s transcendent intro drone. In short, he plays bass like a guitarist.

Thom Yorke, on the other hand, treated hisFender Mustang like a dedicated maestro of the low-end, whether navigatingThe Smoke’s snaking bassline with a deft fingerstyle touch, or laying downThe Opposite’s slinky stabs. No doubt he picked up a few tips from his time spent with Flea in Atoms for Peace, not to mention Jonny’s brother Colin, who was in attendance that evening.

4. Jonny Greenwood sold a whole new audience on the Les Paul

Rather than his customary Tele Plus, Greenwood relied solely on a GoldtopGibson Les Paul for his six-string duties – an instrument rarely seen with the guitar anti-hero outside of performances of Steve Reich’sElectric Counterpoint.

The result was a warmer, more robust sound than his wiry single-coil jabs, and one better suited to bolstering the sound of The Smile’s leaner lineup. It was a reminder of the LP’s ability to generate warm, enveloping clean tones, and any hipsters who sauntered into the show thinking they weren’t a ‘Les Paul kind of guitarist’ left craving a big slab of single-cut.

Yorke, however, broke out many of his regular Radiohead touring instruments, including two Epiphone Casinos (one with Bigsby, one without), drop D-tunedFender Jazzmaster onWe Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings, and aGibson SG for open-tuned C# modal showcaseA Hairdryer. Neil Young-esque balladFree in the Knowledge played host to a Martin 00-18, while a Guild Starfire II hollowbodybass made a thumpy appearance onSkirting on the Surface andThe Opposite.

5. The band are really good at multitasking

Yorke and Greenwood are used to having a few more musicians to play with, so the three-piece format forced every member to cleave their brains in two to conjure the kind of expansive textures you’d expect for their large-scale compositions.

Yorke and Greenwood frequently switched between synths and guitars – Skinner even dropped his sticks for the odd modular workout – while one particularly memorable moment found Greenwood plucking a harp while traversing a spiralling piano line in Radiohead-but-not-quite trackSpeech Bubbles.

Greenwood was masterful with his socked feet, too – on more than one occasion, the multi-instrumentalist went fullGeddy Lee, hittingbass pedals while handling tricksy arpeggiated chords inWaving a White Flag or hammering out a blistering punk bassline inWe Don’t Know What Tomorrow Brings. Blasts of overdrive and Electro-Harmonix Freeze gave smart dynamic contrast to moments of the set, too.

6. The Smile’s debut album will be something special – and there’s more to come

Yes, comparisons with Radiohead are unavoidable by the very nature of the band’s members and their songwriting tendencies. But The Smile color outside of Radiohead’s lines: there’s a sense of experimentalism that embraces krautrock and prog, and one that feels entirely free of expectation.

It’s the sound of three seasoned musicians making music for the sheer thrill of it, using all the tools at their disposal. It’s a joyous thing to behold, and it appears the band agree, already hinting at music beyond the band’s debut album, which is still yet to receive a release date.

“This has been all too brief,” Yorke admitted towards the tail end of the evening’s 70-minute performance. “When we’ve written some more, we’ll do some more, but we haven’t written any more… yet.”