A Realer Sam Smith

Gloria is the singer's most uncompromising work.

- By Craig Jenkins

"Latch" was an explosion no one saw coming, a perfect pop smash from an unknown artist. The singer, pompadoured London dynamo Sam Smith, who used the sprightly beat from the house music duo Disclosure to model a preternatural ease in skating across two octaves, didn't appear to be that invested in the dance of being seen and perceived in the public eye. In the Lonely Hour, Smith's 2014 debut album, was an elaborate performance of meekness from the concept-it's about a nagging unrequited crush-to the presentation. Success had been elusive before the Disclosure hit, a yearslong trail of promising leads that went nowhere. Nobody seemed to know what to do with the voice. (The awkward, scrappy pre-fame recordings on the Sam Smith Diva Boy collection tell that story.) It eluded the listener's handle on genre and gender; Disclosure's Guy Lawrence thought he heard a Black woman singing in the demo that landed Smith the spot on "Latch." These were not the simpler times implied by the current wave of nostalgia for the late aughts, not if you were living outside the cookie-cutter ideas about sexuality and gender expression that prevailed at the time. The pressure Smith felt to fit in and make music that appealed to everyone was a side effect of toiling toward a career in pop music as the press hounded Britney Spears and gay rumors trailed Robbie Williams to the extent that he named his 2013 big-band album Swings Both Ways.

The work it has taken to shake free from the obligation to coddle the audience has been the story of Smith's music and public presence since the singer came out as nonbinary in 2019. Now they write songs about seeking unconditional love and bolstering self-esteem instead of jams about clinging to people who may not even be aware of their feelings.