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It would have been understandable if Sam Smith wanted to stay in the body shop a little while longer. Their 2023 hit “Unholy,” a spooky infidelity bop featuring Kim Petras, was camp enough (in a “Looking camp right in the eye” kind of way) to inspire a period of mass awareness rare for our fractured pop culture landscape. Smith performed it at the Grammys in a silly top hat with devil horns that nonetheless got freaked-out conservatives hooting and hollering about Satan worship; the reality show The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, which follows a group of women with varying levels of devotion to the LDS Church as they argue with each other in comfy sweatsuits and huff nitrous at Botox appointments, used it as the theme song for its pilot before switching to a haunted soundalike for the rest of the series. “Unholy” was a moment, Sam Smith’s first American No. 1, and they could have easily rode the wave and kept putting out mildly salacious, medium-corny, maximally synthetic music forever.
Instead, for their fourth studio album, Smith has swerved. Hazel Eyes is a collection of sophisticated, romantic songs that tap into jazz, blues, and soul, with production that feels much more organic (and much more interesting) than anything they’ve released before. Past Smith projects have tended to be both uncannily polished and indecisively diverse in genre, and while that approach has produced some monster hits, it also waters down their album artistry. Unique choices and important statements were certainly made on the last two Sam Smith albums, but somewhere between the rote Max Martin/Stargate/Shellback production and the lukewarm Ed Sheeran and Demi Lovato features, one might also a detect a certain unwillingness (or inability) to clock out of their long, grueling shift at the hit factory.
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This time around, Smith worked primarily with past collaborator Simon Aldred (according to Smith, the first queer songwriter they ever worked with), became a co-producer for the first time, and managed to create an album with a unified sound that feels unbeholden to any kind of hit quota. It’s also Smith’s first project that tells a complete love story rather than a hodgepodge of desire and dissatisfaction—inspired by their fiancé, the designer Christian Cowan, Smith has drawn up a narrative of a grand love, but doesn’t shy away from the struggles on the road to happiness.
No Windexed piano ballads or builder-grade EDM backing tracks to be found here—the production on Hazel Eyes is fluid and sensual, sounding like it exists in time and space, rather than in the vacuum-sealed void of an A&R guy’s office. Opening track “Everlasting Love” has Smith in lounge-singer mode, purring come-ons over acoustic guitar and swooping strings: “I wanna see all of you, so don’t turn off the light/Will you play the part for just one night?” “Sugar Rush” is a doo-wop song that’s somehow both lusty and adorable, with braying trumpet, cheeky backing vocals, and rattling percussion that makes your head feel like it’s inside a snare drum. This is technically not the first time Smith has dabbled in such instrumentation—2017’s The Thrill of It All was laden with various horns and strings—but the airlessness that deadened some of their past music is gone, and as a result, their vocals sounds more lively than ever before.
Smith’s voice has always been suited to soul music, and they’ve taken plenty of inspiration in the past from Black musical traditions. Those traditions have never been more explicit than on Hazel Eyes, especially because, rather than cram their beloved gospel choirs and R&B inflections into stuffy straight rhythms, Smith loosens up and lets things swing. On “When He’s Gone,” from the segment of the album that shows discord creeping into Smith’s initially idyllic relationship, they fume over their lover’s “cruel and careless words” on a smoky blues track. “Oh Mother” is pure revival meeting: Stung after a betrayal, Smith trades verses with a choir (the excellent TwoCity Chorus) that channels both fiery reproach and divine forgiveness. The song begins with hand claps and Smith singing a capella, then cracks wide open: a slammed piano key, a voice yelling “Let’s go, bitch!,” and a crisp chord from the chorus. Then Smith very much goes, bitch. Even with their considerable vocal talent, this is a big swing, but from the instigating ad-libs to the hushed call-and-response outro—“I need your protection/You have my protection”—their performance is electric.
There aren’t any big name pop stars showing up for duets this time around, but the appearance of Feist as a co-writer and backing vocalist is a very nice surprise. The Canadian indie-pop queen shows up on just two tracks, but you can hear a certain Feist-y quality—unfussy intensity? ardent nonchalance?—throughout the album. The slinky “Moondance” is a particular highlight, with a gnarled guitar solo that wouldn’t have been out of place on Metals, and a heady bridge on which the two singers luxuriate in an extended celestial metaphor for falling in love; it’s so lush and gorgeous, it makes me long for a full Feist/Sam Smith collab album.
Smith has traded aesthetic sleekness for something a little less perfect and a lot more exciting, but their overpowering earnestness remains, and your patience for it may waver. The appearance of the choir, so thrilling on “Oh Mother,” gets a little grating on the final few tracks, which hammer home themes of love and freedom, and metaphors involving rivers and oceans. The “Love is coming to save the day” opening of “Hold On” is particularly gooey, and the title track is so unbelievably ebullient, it almost sounds like the opening number to a contemporary Broadway musical (derogatory). But this is Smith, take ’em or leave ’em—a romantic who’s given their real-life love story a musical treatment that feels true to them, in all its exuberance and occasional excess. Still, their growth is most evident on the album’s quietest moment: “Love Is a Stillness,” a piano ballad that exudes the calm of a steady relationship; Smith sings it with the contentment of someone who has finally found what they’ve spent a long, long time looking for. It turns out “Unholy” might have been the best thing that could have happened to Smith, because its success seems to have allowed them to toss the Dear God I Need a Hit playbook long enough to land on a sound that truly suits them.
