The Smile (Thom Yorke, Jonny Greenwood and Tom Skinner), “Wall Of Eyes.”

The collaboration between Radiohead’s Thom Yorke and Jonny Greenwood with Sons of Kemet drummer Tom Skinner checked all the boxes on the debut album by The Smile, 2022’s A Light For Attracting Attention. It had cool retro synths, psychedelic krautrock, thoughtful ballads and even an overdriven rock number.

Wall of Eyes, the latest by The Smile, takes up where the last album left off, but almost feels like leftovers from the previous album. While still flavorful and filling, the album lacks much of the tension and excitement of its predecessor’s fevered feasting. There is less variety and more depth, so perhaps the album will bloom with time.

The first two songs, the title track and “Teleharmonic,” flow with gauzy energy. The former features strummed acoustic guitar against percussion that gradually grows more unhinged as the song progresses. “You’ll go behind a wall of eyes of your own device/ Is that still you with the hollow eyes?” Thom Yorke sings, seemingly a critique of the narcissism of online culture. A moody black and white video by Hollywood A-list director Paul Thomas Anderson adds to the artsy vibe.

“Teleharmonic,” meanwhile, oozes synthesized washes of sound beneath Yorke’s falsetto vocals.

The third track, “Read the Room,” feels like the first where the music takes center stage. Imagine the guitar part of Aerosmith’s “Dream On” dosed on quaaludes and reassembled after a spin in the blender. Yorke delivers the song’s lyrics with a nasally sneer before the music slows and becomes less manic and heavier guitar parts return for an outro jam.

“Under Our Pillows” sounds like “The Thing” from the band’s last album, featuring the syncopated rhythm of what some refer to as Jonny Greenwood’s trick with delay pedals, a guitar tone that made its first appearance on Radiohead’s “Present Tense,” on 2016 album A Moon Shaped Pool.

The weird piano on “Friend of a Friend” feels a little like a McCartney-penned Beatles song. In fact, later in the song, dissonant glissandos (which move smoothly from a low note to a much higher note) provide a slightly more ominous “A Day in the Life” vibe.

Like T.S. Eliot’s notion of the end of the world, the album ends not with a bang, but with lush and meandering musical whimpers by Thom Yorke. “Bending Hectic,” the longest song on the album at just over eight minutes, moves from sedate and lush guitar through more psychedelic glissandos, eventually arriving at molten noise that calls to mind the disorienting musical vamping of The Butthole Surfers. But the noisy chaos is short-lived, and the album ends with piano ballad “You Know Me,” which like some other songs on this album, takes listeners on a musical journey through a series of sedate moods.

The Smile’s previous effort benefitted from powerful rock songs like “You’ll Never Work In Television Again,” which bristled with refreshing levels of thoroughly British angst. Ballad “Free in the Knowledge” felt like a personal revelation straight from Yorke’s life. You got the sense that, absent the constraints of being one of the most influential rock bands in the world, Yorke and Greenwood were excited to expand their musical boundaries. That’s the problem with making really great albums: even really good follow ups can feel like letdowns. A second trip to paradise always has to compete with memories of the first.