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.

• “Sugar Rush”

  A fleeting moment of retro, freewheeling fun – albeit one that feels out of step with the rest of the record. “Sugar Rush” and its bright, tip toe-ing production and swinging hooks have the buoyancy of a musical theatre number, but there’s something faintly awkward about its arrival here. It’s a charming detour, even briefly a convincing one, yet from the second the choral backing vocals swan in, it starts to feel like a song from a different album wandered onto this one.

• “Love Is a Stillness”

  This track’s brevity – barely two minutes – makes its restraint feel deliberate rather than slight. Smith sings about love as something grounding, a force that holds steady beneath life’s many uncertainties, while a simple piano line leaves enough space for every tremor in their voice to ring out. Then comes a whistle refrain, piercing but tender, that briefly takes the melody someplace else. There’s real vulnerability to Smith’s tone here, octaves jumping like a catch in the throat.

• “When He’s Gone”

  In the space of a few minutes, the arrangement of “When He’s Gone” blends several guitar textures: a loping, country-esque rumble gives way to more intricate acoustic fingerpicking and a wah-wah flourish on the bridge as Smith tells a fractured, dreamlike story about a lover going awry. “If you cut me clean in half,” they sing at one dramatic turn. “His name I will bleed.” There are moments where the song starts and stops in fits, like a much mellower – and poppier – version of a Margo Price track.

• “Hold On”

  “Hold On” is aptly titled, a song built around the tension between wanting to let go and the instinct to cling to what still matters. Its shifting arrangement moves towards something fuller and more enveloping, constantly pushing to reach for a feeling – fleeting, elusive – beyond grasp. By the time it fades out, rumbling drums still churn beneath the surface, as if the song can’t quite bring itself to let go. When Smith finally unsheathes their upper register, it’s in wails of anguish, and it cuts deep.

• “Everlasting Love”

  “Everlasting Love” traces the arc of a blossoming romance, from tentative beginnings to deepening intimacy and the exhilarating possibility of where things could go. Among the record’s (many, many) romantic songs, it feels closest to the innocent feel of Smith’s earliest output. As the arrangement gradually opens up, mirroring the feeling of two people moving towards something more assured, Smith’s voice carries an air of devotion in the final refrain, before a swooning saxophone solo sends it all floating off into the ether.

• “Hazel Eyes”

  The majority of the sonic departures on this record are the gentle sort: from a soft unfurling of piano and strings, to a warm, close-mic’d intimacy twining their voice around lyrics about memory and desire. “Hazel Eyes” contains both of these, as well as offering another moment of inward rumination for Smith. Lyrically, this is a song of relief, where articulating what you need can help reclaim a happiness you once believed to be lost forever.

• “Thief”

  As this ominous track puts it, the night can bring terrors and bouts of insomnia, but moments of lucidity can also lurk within the small hours. “Thief” portrays a version of Smith that is hurt and distrustful, awake past midnight, wine drunk, and haunted by the ghosts of a past relationship. After a hushed opening, the song ignites as a snaking acoustic guitar line pulls Smith’s vocal deeper into the song’s nocturnal haze; their voice remains intimate but increasingly frayed, as if each recollection is another intrusion they can’t quite shut out while everyone else is asleep.

• “Oh Mother”

  At 47 seconds, a scream of “let’s go, b–-ch” arrives like a clarion call, jolting “Oh Mother” into life. Where “Sugar Rush”’s playful abandon falls short, the livewire energy here channels the song’s wider message of needing maternal care in the wake of deception. Against a backdrop of electric guitars, Smith’s passionate performance feels like the song’s driving force, swirling with the gravitational pull of a whirlpool and proving that their desire to be held and understood is bigger than any one betrayal.

• “Constant Companion”

  Met at various points by a gorgeous and barely-there supporting cast, Smith’s vocal wisps between gentle percussion and ascending keys on “Constant Companion,” their cooing falsetto communicating safety. The song, in its understated display of beauty, is an embrace in itself: “All you are is all I need,” Smith repeats, turning the line into a mantra. As is felt across the rest of the album, Smith never tries to resolve any of love’s contradictions; instead, allowing its force to them somewhere beyond fear, towards a new plane of strength and clarity.

• “My Guy”

  On the the lead single, Smith wants it all, without exception: all the comfort, all the understanding, all the love. This is their ode to lifelong commitment, near enough vulnerable to the point of transcendence. The verses are built upon a series of impressions: snatches of romantic imagery (“a rose on a vine”), glimpses into a relationship scored by slow mornings spent listening to music and sharing coffee straight from the stove. These details drift over insistent guitar plucks, giving the song a gentle but yearning momentum.

• “Moondance”

  In a song about a partner who has seemingly taught Smith patience and gentleness, “Moondance” fills out with the kind of luminous detail that makes a feeling seem to glow from within. That sense of wonder is hardly new territory for a ballad, but Smith’s gift has always been making grand emotions feel bodily and immediate, and Feist’s presence adds another grain to that intimacy. Here, Smith pares that gift back: rather than reaching for melodrama, they linger in a hushed, suspended moment when simply embracing someone feels like enough.

• “To Be Free”

  “To Be Free” is a manifesto of survival, a song about treating true liberation as no longer having to brace oneself against the world; that freedom can mean inhabiting an ever-evolving identity without apology. The measured, hookless melody moves with a lightness that belies the weight of that epiphany, as Smith’s voice rises and falls with an almost effortless grace. When they bellow, “Shake off all your burdens / Shame’s no friend of mine” towards the end of the song, it’s a triumphant reminder that their perseverance in the face of expectation and public scrutiny has paid off; for Smith, being free clearly means refusing to be defined by either.