Sam Smith: Gloria album review

It’s awards season, so I’d love to be nominated Sam Smith Best Popular Film of 2022 in a magazine profile. The post was New York Magazine; the The subject was Joel Kim Posterwriter and star of the last year’s soulful pride and prejudice Faces Fire Island. Booster and his friends are walking home from the Silver Lake gay bar when he walks into the bathroom and walks out to announce, “Sam Smith is coming.” Smith is introduced to the reader as “the first openly gay person believed to be the first openly gay person to win an Academy Award during his acceptance speech,” and upon their arrival, tells the party of their plans to visit Anne Boleyn’s tomb in the Tower of London as a small birthday party. This unexpected appearance into the world of Booster also illustrates Smith’s odd blend of true entrepreneurship and cultural conservatism. They are a proud, unapologetic pop star and old soul with a flair for maudlin. Who else “sticks with the English date girls” while partying with Hollywood’s queer royalty?

You can hear both freedom and tenderness Gloria, an album that feels resolute and diverse when faced with a career that’s pretty dilapidated in the middle of the road. Smith has been described Gloria It’s defined as “emotional, sexual, and spiritual liberation,” and if you’ve followed Smith over the past decade, you understand that this kind of unrepentant self-love is hard-earned. Theatrical power that once I begged for a one night stand to get around He turned into a fun lover and student of gay history, sampling RuPaul, Divine, Paris is burningand audio clips from early Pride marches. But these authentic expressions of self share space with an essential closure pathway Ed Sheeran‘s “Same loveAnd this is the conundrum of their career: Smith’s level of taste and writing did not keep up with their comfort in their own skin.

Gloria It delivers much of the core fun you’d expect on any Sam Smith album: the excitement of a gifted singer who explores and subverts his material on a phrase-by-phrase basis. Here it is Smith’s delivery confidence that places the album a little higher within their catalog. Sometimes it’s a chorus or ballad that gets you back on your heels: the slick liquid march on the closing “There’s No God,” or the sticky, greedy chorus on one song’my cloud. Elsewhere, you get the same jolt you might get when you hear a singer Adele turn her talents into Lover’s rock or chanson: “Who knows that they can do that? ” Gloria moves between hyperpop, country, dancehall, disco, two-step, and intimate, Kehlani-esque R&B, though the range covered by the material ends up being more than any sparkling example of genre tourism.