Sam Smith is an old soul with an easily bruised heart. He’s looking for radiant, cinematic love, the kind that springs from a meet-cute at the supermarket when you reach for a can of soup and happen to bump into the man of your dreams. He knows what it’s like to yearn for someone who barely notices you’re alive. He’s well acquainted with romantic desperation, the kind of pitiable state where you betray everything you believe in because you’re just so lonely. And he became one of this decade’s biggest pop stars because he was willing to take all of those desires, no matter how embarrassing, and lay them out in terms everyone can understand.
When you become this successful this fast—2014’s In the Lonely Hour has moved over four million units in the U.S. alone—there’s no sense in reinventing the wheel. His new album, The Thrill of It All, leans on the same strengths that made In the Lonely Hour one of this decade’s most successful debuts. His voice is an ocean liner that can turn on a dime; his ballads are built around mournful piano melodies and fleshed out with choral arrangements; he doles out feelings in bushels.
It’s a formula that remains commercially unimpeachable—lead single “Too Good at Goodbyes” has lingered around the Billboard Top 10 since its release—but it can be exhausting, especially over the course of an entire album. His specific brand of sadness is dark and sticky like molasses, and decent songs get snared. One of two collaborations with the writer/producer Malay, “Say It First” deftly apes the moody, spacey sound of the xx but drags itself down with hopeless neediness. And while “Midnight Train” sounds a little—OK, a lot—like a slow-motion version of Radiohead’s “Creep,” Smith ruins it by agonizing over leaving a relationship that isn’t working: “Am I a monster? What will your family think of me?” You wish the characters in these songs would show themselves a little more respect.
There are a few welcome beams of light. Smith is an Amy Winehouse devotee—he was tweeting context-free lines from “Wake Up Alone” just a few weeks ago, so you know it’s real—and you get the feeling he’d love to make an album as frank and true as Back to Black. Spare bonus track “Nothing Left for You” summons the same genuine rage that made the pissy “I’ve Told You Now” a highlight on In the Lonely Hour. And you can actually imagine Winehouse rolling like a thunderstorm over songs like “One Last Song” and “Baby, You Make Me Crazy,” which leans on a slice of Kool & the Gang’s sunny instrumental “Breeze & Soul.” These aren’t happy songs by any stretch of the imagination: “One Last Song” is a kiss-off to the man who haunted In the Lonely Hour, and Smith hammers “Baby, You Make Me Crazy” home by mewling in that dusky falsetto: “Why’d you have to fill my heart with sorrow?” “I call them ’dance and cry’ songs,” Smith told Rolling Stone. “I love songs like that.” Call them whatever you want; these are the warmest, most radiant songs in his catalog. There’s joy in them, or at the very least a light at the end of the tunnel.
The Thrill of It All even features a few songs that leave heartbreak in the rear-view mirror. They aren’t all successful, but they’re interesting experiments for someone whose bread and butter is romantic dissatisfaction. “Too Good at Goodbyes” may sound like a goopier version of Adele’s “Set Fire to the Rain,” but it’s a snapshot of someone who’s grown up enough to step past hopeless wallowing. Learning to harden your heart doesn’t feel good, but it’s a necessary move in a cruel world. “Pray” is a limp collaboration with a past-his-prime Timbaland, but its premise is fascinating given its singer’s notorious naivete: Where do you turn when you just can’t ignore what’s going on in the world around you? (Smith wrote the song after spending five days in Mosul, Iraq with the charity War Child.) And “HIM,” on which Smith inhabits the shoes of a gay child in the South struggling to reconcile his religious upbringing and his sexual orientation, is even more intriguing. It’s an explicit coming-out song, and that’s a surprising choice for someone who consciously avoided gender pronouns on In the Lonely Hour so straight people could find themselves in his songs too. It may come off a little like Costco-brand Perfume Genius, but it’s a start.
That’s a fair way to describe The Thrill of It All as a whole: it’s a start, or at least a fresh one. The last few years haven’t been kind to Smith from a PR perspective; he’s developed a nasty habit of jamming his foot into his mouth. He said apps like Tinder and Grindr are “ruining romance,” alienating fans who use them because they’re anxious or don’t feel safe trying to meet people; he discovered racism one night in London and couldn’t believe how unhelpful the police were; he drank too much at the Oscars, misspoke, and got raked over the coals the next day. In short, he seems like a well-meaning, guileless person, one whose music reconciles with being held as a person of prominence and one of the most famous gay people on the planet. “I’m not the most eloquent person,” said Smith in an empathetic profile in The New York Times. “I didn’t get the best grades in school. I mean, I’m just good at singing.”
