Sam Smith has spent much of their career turning heartbreak into something grand enough to fill an arena. On Hazel Eyes, the multiplatinum, Grammy-, BRIT-, Golden Globe- and Oscar-winning singer takes a more intimate approach, transforming New York City into both a setting and character for a deeply personal story about love, loss and self-discovery.

Recorded over three years at New York’s Electric Lady Studios, Hazel Eyes is billed as an ode to the city Smith now calls home. Created primarily with longtime collaborator and friend Simon Aldred, the album also brings together an eclectic creative circle that includes singer-songwriter Feist, multi-instrumentalist and composer Shahzad Ismaily, and string arranger Rob Moose. Smith co-produced the record with Aldred and David Odlum, together building a tower of sound that balances live instrumentation with the emotional scale a voice like Smith’s demands.

At its heart, Hazel Eyes is a modern fairytale about requited love, tracing a relationship through its various weather systems: domestic intimacy, desire, conflict and eventual loss. The record’s lead single, “My Guy,” captures its warmet side. Written with friends during a summer day in New York, the song finds Smith celebrating the kind of closeness that can make an otherwise chilly city feel incandescent. Feist and Moses Sumney contribute backing vocals, adding to the song’s communal glow. “It makes me cry,” Smith says of “My Guy.” “Maybe it will make you feel a little love too.”

Elsewhere, the album turns toward more complicated territory. “When He’s Gone” represents what Smith describes as the melancholy shade of partnership. Recorded live without a click track, the performance became the foundation for the arrangement, preserving the tension of a song that seems to sense bad weather approaching from somewhere beyond the horizon. What begins restrained gradually expands into a stormier final section, returning over and over to its devastating refrain. 

The album does reach beyond romance though. “To Be Free” and “Love Is A Stillness” deepen the record’s themes of vulnerability and artistic liberation, while Smith’s July release “Oh Mother,” recorded in call-and-response with the 28-member TwoCity Chorus, adds something completely different to the proceedings.

After years of global fame and songs that made private pain feel universal, Hazel Eyes is Sam Smith searching for something quieter: freedom, connection and a home. New York supplies the backdrop, but the real landscape is in his mind. This is Sam Smith opening the door and letting the light in.