“There seems to be an idea among guitarists that something as remarkable as a box that creates a perfect echo is old, played out or overused”: Why Jonny Greenwood downsized his rig to just a guitar, amp and delay pedal to write the Smile’s new album

The Smile – the sonically adventurous trio of Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood, and jazz drummer Tom Skinner – are fresh off the release of Cutouts, the band’s second album of 2024, and third in as many years overall.

That sentence in particular is still a surprising one for many Radiohead fans, given that eight years and counting have elapsed since that band’s last studio effort. Then again, despite featuring Radiohead’s two principal members, the Smile are a very different beast indeed.

The sheer knottiness and prog inclinations of their music, even in comparison to Radiohead’s more difficult material, were apparent from their very first gigs. Also apparent from those early shows was Jonny Greenwood’s newfound love of rhythmic delay pedals, a preference the guitarist expounded upon in a new interview with NME.

“The guitar parts [on Cutouts] are often focused on using a delay pedal,” Greenwood said. “A few years ago, I started to wonder if technology was moving too fast to appreciate how powerful old ideas – like a simple echo – still were. So I decided to just use a delay pedal, a guitar, and an amp for a year or two, and see what I could write with that (supposed) limitation.

“But then,” he continued, “the guitar, on its own, is already an amazing thing. Treating the delay as its equal opened up lots of directions. It’s still giving me ideas – probably to the point of nausea for Thom and Tom, but maybe there’s still room for a few more on the next record. If they’re different enough…”

The Smile – Eyes & Mouth (Visualiser) – YouTube

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One looking for an example of this delay-forward sound need only hear the Cutouts standout Eyes and Mouth, which has been kicking around the trio’s setlist since the beginning.

GW.com EIC Michael Astley-Brown, writing about the band’s first gigs, wrote, “With the wrong pedalboard, set closer Eyes and Mouth could be mistaken for a pentatonic scale exercise, but a shower of dotted-eighth repeats lent it an altogether more ethereal quality.”

Greenwood’s guitar approach has branched off in other ways with the Smile, the most notable being his adoption of a Gibson Les Paul.

Though he’s used a Les Paul on occasion with Radiohead, and never kept to one model exclusively overall, Greenwood is synonymous with his Honda sticker-adorned Tobacco Burst Telecaster Plus, which he can be seen thrashing on in just about every Radiohead era, particularly in their earlier days.

Asked by The Sunday Guardian in 2015 why he had been playing a Les Paul more frequently, Greenwood nonchalantly offered, “Guitars are like typewriters. It’s technology, it’s not something to be admired or worshipped. Like, oh, a washing machine or something. It does the job.

“You start seeing people putting them on walls as decorations and it’s just… it’s like putting a vacuum cleaner there. That’s really bizarre for me. They’re okay; they all sound the same, it’s the brutal truth.”