Sam Smith’s ‘Hazel Eyes’: All 12 Songs Ranked

With Hazel Eyes, Sam Smith charts a fresh, emboldened emotional hinterland. Across the London-born singer’s four previous albums, the question of who exists beyond that distinct, aching, soulful voice has loomed large.

Smith initially built a career, after all, on the strange alchemy of writing about heartbreak from largely hypothetical pain; they penned 2014 global smash In the Lonely Hour before ever experiencing a breakup. The albums that followed gradually filled in the blanks – desire, growth, personal identity, sex – though with the sense of an artist discovering themselves and testing out what they want to say to the world. In the process, they have scooped billions of streams, five Grammy Awards and seven Billboard Hot 100 top 10 hits — and with 2023 Kim Petras collab “Unholy,” became the first openly nonbinary artist to top the chart.

At times, Smith’s fifth full-length effort gets closer than ever to answering that question. The dual muses across Hazel Eyes become figures in a wider romantic mythology; even when their partner, the (hazel-eyed) fashion designer Christian Cowan, or their newly adopted home of New York City enters the frame, lyrically, the 34-year-old avoids rendering them literally to instead focus on capturing the feelings they inspire.

Until now, Smith “didn’t understand what my heart was for,” they tell us on the title track; “To Be Free,” the record’s searching and graceful closer, reckons with harbouring shame and maintaining a public persona, only to realise that patient, requited love can offer an escape from performing different versions of the self.

The latter track lent its name to Smith’s U.S. concert hall residencies last year, which included 24 sold-out nights at Warsaw in Brooklyn and will head to Manchester’s Albert Hall (Sept. 3-4) and the London Coliseum (Sept. 8-19) for a further 10 shows next month. In the states, Smith was joined onstage by a plethora of pop luminaries, including Ed Sheeran, Hozier and Sienna Spiro. Yet for all its starry cameos, the run featured minimal stage production in order to zone in and illuminate the sheer force of Smith’s vocal, with little to distract from it after the pop-baiting campaigns of their past two records (2020’s fairly tepid Love Goes, and its expressive if uneven 2023 follow-up Gloria).

While it was enlivening to hear Smith stretch beyond the soft-focus piano pop balladry of their earlier work, particularly on the slinky, trop-pop-influenced chart hit “How Do You Sleep?” or the disco-fied “I’m Not Here to Make Friends,” Hazel Eyes finds them returning  familiar textures with a newly exploratory ear. Its sound is pared back to the hallmarks of their earlier output but within that palette, Smith makes room for subtle surprises, weaving flourishes of country guitar into “When He’s Gone” and teaming up with seminal Canadian indie songwriter Feist on multiple tracks, whose influence feels particularly pertinent throughout the emphatic storytelling of “Moondance.”

As Hazel Eyes adds another layer to Smith’s story, its title itself an ode to Cowan and the pair’s recent engagement, here’s every track from the new record ranked.