The Smile — the trio consisting of Tom Skinner and Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood — recently announced some North American tour dates. Based on how their current European tour dates and festival appearances are going, those US and Canada dates could end up being a good opportunity to hear some new music before the band actually releases it; The band has been playing a new song called “Colours Fly” and now they’ve debuted another unreleased tune on stage, “Bending Hectic.”
They played the song at Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival. While introducing the song, Yorke, seemingly looking at some sort of paper or screen, indicated the song is a recent one as he said aloud, “Ya, I can see the words; That’s good, ’cause I just wrote them.”
The tune is a lengthy one (at least as it was performed here), running for about seven minutes. It starts off an an atmospheric sort of freeform jam before eventually picking up steam and transforming into more of an aggressive rocker.
The Smile actually have a number of unreleased songs that pop up in their sets. Aside from the two aforementioned, their Montreaux performance also featured “Just Eyes And Mouth” and “Bodies Laughing,” both of which have been performed upwards of 20 times, per Setlist.fm.
Watch The Smile perform “Bending Hectic” above.