Review: "Foreign Spies may be some of the strongest work The Smile puts out – and we can only speculate on whether there is to be a hiatus or a continuation of this longing, well-placed instrumental style. Their ambient charms are on point for this single, a light and breezy appeal to the Greenwood contributions pours through. Yorke is given a platform to work within the chimes and string sections, his voice just another part of this instrumental choir rather than a standout piece as it was in earlier songs. Allowing Yorke to fall back onto this bed of instrumentals is an envious moment for the band, one of their best can be heard on the elusive nature of Foreign Spies."

Review: "‘Instant Psalm’ is evocative of 1960s stoner pop. It’s warm, it’s psychedelic, it glows. Where the hell is Thom Yorke still pulling melodies of this calibre from, by the way, at his time of life? Surely witchcraft. This band is having a ball, that much is plain. It’s a danceable album, upbeat in tone basically all the way through."

Review: "Jolting guitars pierce the soundscape, instantly drawing us into a fast-paced world of delightful chaos. You can’t keep still when listening to this one, and as Yorke repeats “that’s another red flag, red flag,” and brass chimes in, you might find yourself needing to pause for breath after listening."

Review: "The Smile’s first two albums ran the gamut of the different musical styles that Yorke and Greenwood had explored throughout their careers, but here they find some new avenues to tread. “Colours Fly” reflects Greenwood’s growing immersion in Middle Eastern music, beginning with Eastern scales played on guitar before unfurling into a blur of woodwind and disembodied vocals redolent of the title track from David Bowie’s Blackstar."

Review: "Like the Smile’s past albums, Cutouts maintains a healthy balance between its numerous styles—and between feeling like a Thom Yorke solo project and the work of a proper band in the way that Atoms for Peace’s Amok never did. “Eyes & Mouth” hurtles forward on the force of Greenwood’s scalar stepwise guitar and drummer Tom Skinner’s runs on his toms and hi-hats, with piano chords and Yorke’s harmonies providing a solid foundation to all the chaos."

Review: "Sonically the entire shebang gleams. ‘Don’t Get Me Started’ especially, zig zags engrossingly from earphone to earphone, weaving woozily, as if jamming in some fantastical hall of mirrors."

Review: "The slow number, ‘Tiptoe’, is absolutely gorgeous. All that soundtrack experience Jonny – and lately Thom – have been bagging in Tinseltown is clearly paying off. Refined strings, squalls of piano, syrupy vocals. Is the lyric, admonishing “appeasers and enablers”, a dig at the fuckheads egging on World War III as I write? Feels like it, from where I’m sitting. "

Review: "On “The Slip,” when the biting two-chord riff splinters off into squealing string bends, I get flickers of the same rush I got from Greenwood’s playing in the ‘90s. Despite his achievements as a composer and arranger, the man was born to wrangle epiphanies from the neck of a guitar, and it’s a genuine privilege to hear him cutting loose again."

Review: "The guitarist is in the driving seat for much of the record. He unleashes pile-driving angst on the magnificent krautrock chugger “No Words”, where descending notes interweave with Skinner’s freight-train drumming. You couldn’t possibly hum it in the shower. But, like so much else here, the sense of eavesdropping on artists playing without fear or concern for musical boundaries is fascinating and often breathtaking."

Review: "“Bodies Laughing” is strikingly beautiful in the vein of Radiohead’s “Present Tense” from 2016’s A Moon Shaped Pool. It has an irregular structure and a shifting harmony that never quite resolves. Like the Smile’s output as a whole, the song unfurls in such a way—through well-placed key changes and the subtle introductions of new instrumentation—that makes its progression feel all but inevitable."