On Myles Smith’s debut album, the singer-songwriter reveals who he is beyond his massive breakout hits—and embraces vulnerability, optimism and the power of collective experience along the way. How do you approach a debut album after you’ve already scored massive global hits? For Myles Smith, who broke out in 2024 with the huge singles “Stargazing” and “Nice to Meet You”, it was a chance to let people get to know the man behind those soaring songs. “I wanted to introduce myself to the world,” the Luton folk-pop singer-songwriter tells Apple Music. “I think a lot of people know the music, but not necessarily me. I wanted my debut album to carry weight. I didn’t just want to write 15 ‘Stargazing’s or 15 ‘Nice to Meet You’s.” So on My Mess, My Heart, My Life., Smith—who also co-produced most of the record—explores mental health struggles (“Sertraline”), love that’s sometimes deep, sometimes difficult (“Hate You”), and his often tough upbringing (“Sisters crying, slamming doors/Plates are flying, I was born into a fractured family/Where a word could start a war” opens the album). It’s an album fuelled by emotion, vulnerability and sincerity, and Smith’s “journey of self-discovery”. And yet, even around some of the tougher moments, there’s always room for hope and joy—every sing-along chorus a rush of optimism and an invitation to work it all out together. “For me it’s all about connection and people,” says Smith. “If people leave this album having experienced a range of emotions after listening, I will have done my job.” Read on for his track-by-track guide. “My Mess” “I saw it as exposure therapy. I wanted to put people in a position of being disarmed going into the rest of the album. I wanted to be open and vulnerable from the offset so people knew instantly what the tone was. It’s a super-important song for me. I always try to balance songs that are heavier with hope. Sometimes, you can’t force hope into a lyric so you have to create it in the sonic world.” “Hold Me in the Dark” “I actually wrote this song about a pair of headphones that I had when I was younger. I grew up in quite a disruptive household, so I used to sit in my room and play music and just block out the world. It’s another chapter of my life, another part of my life, but tied up in poetic licence that I thought was really beautiful.” “Hate You” “We didn’t want to make a song, that’s about this angsty feeling, feel overly angsty, where it then becomes sort of like a caricature of itself. So we tried to place it in a space where the production wasn’t overdone. We had so many versions of this song—some that were a lot bigger and then some smaller. At the time, I was listening to songs that I grew up on and really showed me vulnerability in men, like Labrinth’s ‘Jealous’, and ‘Another Love’ by Tom Odell and ‘Only Love’ by Ben Howard. I kind of wanted to do my version of what that looks like in relationships.” “Grandma’s Place” “It came around very spontaneously. I met [Nashville songwriter and producer] Gabe Simon for the first time and we wrote that song. He said to me, ‘What do you want to talk about that you don’t talk about much?’ We ended up talking for a few hours about my situation with my grandma and my dad’s family and all the hardship. He said, ‘Go in the room and just say it. Don’t be poetic, just say what you just told me.’ I kept writing really cool lines and he was like, ‘Don’t make it cool.’ It came out literally head to mouth, there wasn’t much thinking in between, and I think that’s why it’s got that diaristic personality.” “Mary’s Song” “I spent some time watching Adolescence and Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere and things like that. It really shocked me and prompted memories of two important people in my life who had been through quite awful situations but had remained so resilient and smiling and brave. I just wanted to represent an issue that you hear a lot of women talking about, but not a lot of men talking about, and particularly not a lot of Black men talking about.” “Sertraline” “I’m in love with the fact that half of the world knows exactly what this song’s about and the other half go, ‘I’ve never heard that name before.’ I wrote this song for myself and people who have been in a position of needing help. I wanted it to be as honest as possible. Mental health and mental health journeys are always presented as like, ‘It’s gonna be bad, but then you’re gonna be good and everything’s great.’ But the reality is like, ‘Things are bad, things get better, and then things might get bad again.’ There wasn’t something that existed for me that said that. I wanted to say that openly and transparently.” “Drive Safe” (with Niall Horan) “Niall is amazing. We have a mutual friend, [US songwriter] Steph Jones. I had this song that me and Steph wrote a while back with Pete [Fenn] and Jesse [Fink], and we got like the bones of it, but we could never quite finish it. I got introduced to Niall and sent him the song and said, ‘I can’t figure out for the life of me what is going to finish this.’ When he liked it, I asked if he’d be down to be on it. We cracked the code within a couple hours in the studio and it all made sense. That song has so many different meanings, and I think that’s the beauty of it. ‘Drive safe’ meant something completely different to all of us.” “Heaven” “It came super late in the album-making process. But Pete, my exec producer, best friend, and Jesse, my best friend and co-writer, both just got married and both just had kids. Like peak love. And it was hard not to be inspired by it. I wanted to write a song about those guys and the situation that they’re in. It’s probably the only song that isn’t written about me personally.” “Dying Days” “This was meant to be the closing track on the album. I was like, ‘If I were to write an end credit for every romance film I’ve ever seen, what would it sound like?’ So I watched a bunch of rom-coms for two weeks. This is me living my dream of writing an end-credit scene. It’s me binge-watching rom-coms. It’s the ending of my movie—my album—and it just felt so right.” “Lifetime” “A lot of this album was about me between 18 and 23. There was a romance I had, and I remember going back through my therapy notes about it, and it was just how I felt in that moment. I did have a rough late teens and early twenties, and yes, there were a lot of things that were difficult and complicated. But there were also really amazing parts that shaped me and made me the person that I am.” Disc 2 Tracks “Each of these tracks represents a little checkpoint in my career [Disc 2 is four previous singles, plus the previously unreleased ‘Dublin Lights’]. It’s a nice little synopsis of chapter one. I started on ‘Dublin Lights’ because I co-wrote that one with Steve Mac, Ed Sheeran and Peter Fenn. I’ve always wanted to write a song with Ed Sheeran, and I was like, ‘I’ve done it. Fuck yeah, this is going on there.’ They’re songs I knew would be on an album, but it took a little bit longer to get here than I expected; you can’t rush creativity. And so having Disc 1 and 2 definitely came from thinking, ‘I know what I want to say, but I can’t miss out the steps that got me here.’ I don’t want to misrepresent the journey.”