On 21 August Sam Smith presents Hazel Eyes - the fifth studio album of his career and an candid musical dedication to New York, the city the artist now calls home. Created in a period of personal and creative change, the project explores emotional vulnerability, the freedom to follow your own direction, and those quiet moments when a person remains alone with themselves.
Rather than striving for showy drama, Hazel Eyes finds its strength in intimacy. The voice of Sam Smith is once again at the centre, but this time it sounds freer and more immediate - as part of music that does not hide its imperfections, pauses and hesitations. The romantic image of the city runs through the whole album - New York is at once a real place, a new beginning and the backdrop to stories of love, loneliness, desire and belonging.
A key partner in creating the project is the performer's longtime friend and collaborator Simon Aldred. Sam Smith produced the album together with Aldred and David Odlum, and among the guests stands out the Canadian singer and songwriter Feist, who features on Moondance. On Oh Mother, The TwoCity Chorus also joins, giving the song a larger choral sound.
The first official single My Guy sets the emotional tone of the album with a warm and unpretentious confession of mutual love and the need for true closeness. The song carries the feeling of a classic love composition, but is delivered with the openness characteristic of Sam Smith - with no distance between the performer and the feeling.
The project also includes the songs released in 2025, Love Is A Stillness and To Be Free. Initially presented as a Valentine's Day gift, Love Is A Stillness seeks love not in grand gestures, but in the calm and security that two people can find in each other. To Be Free, built around voice and guitar, places at its centre the longing for acceptance and the freedom to live without fear of others' judgement.
With its 12 compositions, Hazel Eyes traces the different faces of intimacy - from the excitement of a new feeling in Sugar Rush and the promise of constancy in Constant Companion, to the absence that remains in When He's Gone, and the emotional reckoning of Hold On. Titles such as Everlasting Love, Thief and the eponymous Hazel Eyes complete a portrait of love as something at once beautiful, uncertain and constantly changing.
A holder of multiple GRAMMY, BRIT, Golden Globe and Oscar awards, Sam Smith continues to build his career on the ability to turn the most personal experiences into universal songs. In Hazel Eyes this ability is expressed not through an attempt to repeat past successes, but through the confidence to let the music be quieter, more human and closer to the truth.
Vinyl Contents:
1. Everlasting Love
2. Hazel Eyes
3. Moondance feat. Feist
4. My Guy
5. When He's Gone
6. Thief
7. Love Is A Stillness
8. Sugar Rush
9. Oh Mother feat. The TwoCity Chorus
10. Constant Companion
11. Hold On
12. To Be Free
