So much has changed for Sam Smith since “Latch,” the 2012 collaboration with Disclosure that introduced their cloud-grazing tenor to the world. They’ve collected Grammys (for the anthemic ballad “Stay with Me” in 2015) and an Oscar (for James Bond theme “Writing’s on the Wall” in 2016); they came out as nonbinary in 2019, fell madly in love, and got engaged. But it was 2022’s “Unholy,” the chart-topping duet with Kim Petras, that released Smith’s inhibitions and allowed them to make Hazel Eyes, their fifth—and most “freed”—album. “It felt like a really messy birth—musically,” Smith tells Apple Music of the epiphany brought on by “Unholy” and Gloria, their subsequent album. “Hazel Eyes is the next reaction after that: I was like, ‘Oh wow, I can now sing my song, and I can now really do what I want to do.’ It just made me feel safe to be myself.” Yet Hazel Eyes sounds nothing like their expansive hit. Acoustic strums, melodies carried by single piano notes or lingering electric guitar, soft voices building into the joyous sound of a choir—they’re all in the mix of this 12-song testament to Smith’s capacity for love. Their voice remains potent and pure, whether they’re belting out a declaration of adoration (“My Guy”), delighting in doo-wop (“Sugar Rush”), or singing sotto voce with tear-jerking closer “To Be Free.” “There is love woven through the whole thing,” they say. “Queer love, nonbinary love; for me, I never saw that on the global world stage. And so, I wanted this album to feel a little bit old-world. And I am openly in love in the world on this planet, dressed in this old, beautiful, timeless but kind of dramatically timeless [sound].” Smith credits their “beautiful little safe bubble” of collaborators—namely producer Simon Aldred, a longtime friend and mentor—and the first gay men Smith met in the industry with giving them the space to reach new vulnerability while writing about navigating romantic relationships. They are happily planning their forever with their fiancé, but that doesn’t mean that Hazel Eyes is without tension or pain. “Thief,” a smoldering confrontation that hints at a betrayal in a long-distance relationship, had Smith facing one of their biggest challenges—and breakthroughs—as an artist to date. “For me, the hardest part is to capture the love in the darkness, because there’s hard moments in a relationship that are painful, and they don’t feel like love,” they say. “I wasn’t going to put ‘Thief’ on the album. It was a very intense writing session, quite numbing. But immediately after I wrote that song, I needed relief: I was like, ‘Some shit has gone down, but I’m still in love and happy.’ That’s when we wrote ‘Love Is a Stillness.’ That recording on the album is the actual recording of that moment after writing ‘Thief’ in my garage. Out of this horribly dark storm, we captured the first ray of sunlight. That, to me, is love.” This was one of Hazel Eyes’s most enduring lessons for Smith: Nothing good ever comes easy, be it a love that lasts or a song that strikes a chord. “I thought that when I fell in love, I wouldn’t be able to access sadness, melancholy, all of the good stuff that I love in music a lot of the time,” they say. “I can capture it more intensely, actually, now because now I think I feel deeper things through love than I did before. I thought everything had to be perfect, but it’s actually just working through hard things with someone. When you reach the other side, there’s just nothing like it.”