It has long been believed that the 'normal' (non-superconducting) state of the high-transition-temperature superconductors is anything but normal. In particular, this state, which exists above the superconducting transition temperature Tc, has very unusual transport properties and electron spectral functions, presenting a more difficult, complex and important problem than the superconductivity itself. The origin of this difficulty and complexity resides in the strong electronic correlations, or the many-body Coulomb interactions between electrons, which cannot be properly treated within the standard theories of the electronic structure of solids. A new treatment of these interactions, on the basis of a Gutzwiller projection—which gives zero quasiparticle weight at the Fermi surface and removes the possibility for double electron occupancy on any one site—has recently been proposed8, but fits to available data were unsatisfactory. Here, we compare the electron spectral functions computed within this