On their fifth album ‘Hazel Eyes,’ Sam Smith swaps pop spectacle for an intimate, genre-roaming portrait of requited love
Sam Smith built an empire on heartbreak they had not yet lived. The London singer wrote In the Lonely Hour, and its inescapable 2014 smash “Stay With Me,” before ever enduring a real breakup, mining hypothetical pain for songs that moved 65 million albums and racked up nearly 60 billion streams. So the central question of their fifth album, Hazel Eyes, released August 21 via Capitol Records, is a genuinely interesting one. What does one of pop’s great mourners sound like once they are finally, securely in love? The answer, it turns out, is quieter, warmer, and more complicated than you might expect.
Hazel Eyes arrives as the follow-up to 2023’s Gloria, the album that blew Smith’s sound wide open with the menacing global hit “Unholy“ and a newfound sense of creative freedom. Where Gloria chased liberation on a maximalist, dancefloor scale, Hazel Eyes pulls sharply inward. Initially it can read as a retreat, but it plays less like a return to basics than an attempt to redraw what a Sam Smith record can be.
A New World Built on Acoustic Ground
Across 12 tracks, Smith wanders through baroque pop, British folk, gospel, outlaw country, doo-wop, and blues without letting the album collapse into a genre buffet. The connective tissue is acoustic instrumentation: live drums, wandering guitars, choirs, horns, strings, and, of course, that magnificent voice, which stays mostly restrained throughout. It is a bold choice for a singer whose gift has always been making vulnerability sound enormous. Here, Smith trusts the smaller register.
The muse is explicit and grounding. Hazel Eyes is an ode to Smith’s fiancé, fashion designer Christian Cowan, and their newly adopted home of New York City, though Smith mostly avoids rendering either literally, choosing instead to capture the feelings they inspire. The title track lands the thesis plainly, with Smith admitting they “didn’t understand what my heart was for” until now. On “Everlasting Love,” the album’s hazy, crooning opener, the titular hazel eyes usher in a whole new world of joy, and that adoration ripples outward across the record.
Smith does not fly solo through this world. Feist lends her voice to the celestial “Moondance,” the TwoCity Chorus supplies transcendent gospel lift throughout, and the album carries the communal spirit of Smith’s To Be Free residency, the run of intimate concert-hall shows that hosted guests including Brandi Carlile, Hozier, and Kim Petras. That live, in-the-room warmth is all over the recording.
When the Metaphors Get in the Way
The album is strongest when it lets complication in. This is not a simple story of bliss. At its most compelling, Hazel Eyes wrestles with betrayal and the difficulty of trust, giving requited love genuine emotional stakes rather than a greeting-card sheen. The searching closer “To Be Free,” which named the residency, reckons with shame and the exhausting work of maintaining a public persona, only to find that patient love offers an escape from performing endless versions of the self. It is the most quietly moving thing here.
Where the record stumbles is in its imagery. Smith leans hard on generalized nature metaphors, and they pile up fast. “Moondance” stacks so much celestial language that even Feist cannot keep it earthbound, and “Hold On” cycles through rivers, tides, oceans, and fruit trees to express perseverance in terms that feel overly familiar. You cross a river to get through hardship, and so on. When the writing gets specific, the album soars. When it retreats into the universal, it drifts.
Still, Hazel Eyes is a rewarding and often lovely reinvention. For a singer who spent a decade perfecting the sound of longing, learning to write convincingly about contentment is its own kind of risk, and Smith mostly clears the bar. It is not their most immediate record, and it will not spawn another “Unholy,” but that is precisely the point. Hazel Eyes is the sound of an artist who no longer needs the spectacle, because they finally have the real thing.
