Released by The Smile on November 13th, 2023, Wall of Eyes summons an atmosphere so elusive yet intimate, it feels as though one is waking into a slow, disoriented dream. The track opens with a hazy, repetitive guitar pattern, more felt than heard, woven delicately with subdued percussion and a faint synth resonance, laying the groundwork for an unsettling calm. There’s a deceptive softness in its early bars, a kind of ghostly quiet that grips you not with urgency, but with suggestion. This is not a track that demands your attention, it hypnotizes it, gently guiding you into a mood of surveillance and introspection, like stepping through fog into a room where the walls can see.
Musically, Wall of Eyes is a masterclass in restraint and control. The Smile, composed of Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood, and Tom Skinner, eschew traditional verse-chorus structures in favor of ambient minimalism. Greenwood’s guitar, softly cyclical and soaked in tremolo, drips with unease. Meanwhile, Skinner’s drumming remains distant and deliberate, functioning more as textural punctuation than rhythm-keeper. As the song progresses, additional layers of instrumentation creep in with stealth: string fragments shimmer, low-end synth tones breathe underneath, and dissonant frequencies hover just above the surface. The arrangement expands like a slow inhalation, reaching toward tension without release, building without ever toppling over.
Thom Yorke’s vocal delivery is, as always, a marvel of quiet dread. In Wall of Eyes, he sings not with the theatricality of a frontman, but with the disembodied weariness of a man dissolving into the background. His voice begins as a whisper, coiling gently around the guitar motif, as if he’s murmuring to himself rather than the listener. There’s a line where he counts softly, “One, two, three”, that sends a shiver through the arrangement, not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s so achingly human. Yorke sounds fragile, almost sedated, his tone suspended in emotional limbo. Yet through that fragility emerges a palpable weight, the crushing anxiety of being watched, of confronting a wall that stares back.
What’s most remarkable about the song is how the vocals and instrumentation don’t merely coexist, they intertwine. The guitar’s cautious repetition mimics the hesitancy in Yorke’s delivery, while Greenwood’s subtly jarring harmonics mirror the emotional dissonance in the lyrics. The orchestration, arranged with Greenwood’s signature cinematic sensibility, creeps in like a presence rather than a sound. Each violin swell, every bend in harmony, enhances the sense of being both lost and examined. Together, they create a sonic tableau that feels like a surveillance state rendered in sound, where beauty flickers faintly through the dread. The atmosphere conjured by this song is thick and spellbinding. It evokes the voyeuristic paranoia of 1984 and the surreal drift of A Moon Shaped Pool, yet stands firmly in its own tonal identity.
There’s a bossa nova undertone in the rhythmic sway, subtle, but noted by many critics, that adds to the track’s uncanny feel, as if the music is pretending to dance but refuses to let go of its tension. The production, handled by longtime collaborator Sam Petts-Davies, is meticulously polished yet never sterile. It captures every nuance, from the hush of Yorke’s breath to the eerie decay of strings, amplifying the emotional resonance without overwhelming the arrangement. Every sonic element is placed with surgical precision, allowing the negative space to speak just as loudly as the instruments. From the moment Wall of Eyes begins, I felt as though I had entered a space that was both intimate and impenetrable, like standing inside a thought.
There’s a hypnotic sense of stillness in the song, a floating quality that slowly tightens around you the longer you listen. It made me feel watched, yes, but also oddly serene, as if acknowledging the constant gaze gave me back some agency. The Smile aren’t offering answers or emotional catharsis here; they are holding up a mirror to a collective anxiety and painting it in spectral sound. And somehow, that confrontation, so quiet and ominous, feels oddly comforting in its honesty. Wall of Eyes is a threshold. It doesn’t announce itself; it lures you in, and once you’re inside, it reshapes your perception of space, sound, and silence. Through sparse instrumentation, immersive textures, and a vocal performance that trembles with weight, The Smile have created a sonic experience that’s at once delicate and disquieting. This is not background music; this is music that watches you back.
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