Sam Smith releases new album Hazel Eyes

Sam Smith's new album, "Hazel Eyes," is out now, and the singer says it is the most hopeful record of their career, built around what they call, for the first time, "a pure love song." Speaking to NPR's All Things Considered from Mexico City while on tour, Smith said the title track was inspired by their fiance, fashion designer Christian Cowan, and grew out of a mistaken assumption: Smith wrote the song believing "hazel eyes" meant a hazelnut brown color, only for Cowan to later point out that his eyes aren't technically hazel at all.

Smith, known for hits including "Stay With Me" and the Kim Petras collaboration "Unholy," has built a career on emotionally raw pop ballads, earning Grammy, Brit and Oscar wins along the way. Much of that catalog, including their previous album, Gloria, centered on loneliness and unrequited love, a tendency the New York Times once summed up by calling Smith a "heartbreak specialist."

On "Hazel Eyes," Smith wanted to write from inside a stable, requited relationship instead of around its absence. The song "Everlasting Love" traces that shift directly: Smith began the lyrics with co-writer Simon Aldred months before meeting Cowan, framing it as an ode to the loneliness of casual encounters, then returned three years later, once the couple was together, to write a second half about waking up beside someone they loved.

The album closes with "Hold On," which Smith described as a message to their younger self and to younger queer listeners, telling them to hold on because love is coming. Smith said the shift reflects a real change in how they experience both love and sadness now that they have a partner to share both with, rather than an erasure of the sadness their earlier albums leaned on. "Hazel Eyes" lands on the release calendar as one of the more high-profile pop releases of the week.