Sam Smith

In February 2016, Sam Smith took the stage at the Dolby Theatre to accept the Academy Award for Spectre. He was twenty-three, and his orchestral ballad divided the franchise's longtime fans. Into the microphone, he said he might be the first openly gay man to win an Oscar, a major slip that the press corrected within seconds by recalling names like Dustin Lance Black or Elton John. The trophy was already in his hands.

Before heading to Los Angeles, he cleaned bathrooms at a London bar while looking for small-time theater auditions. Classical jazz training with Joanna Eden gave him a vocal technique unusual for British pop of his generation. So in 2012, a chorus borrowed for the track Latch by the duo Disclosure was all it took to land his first record deal with Capitol Records.

The release of In the Lonely Hour in 2014 sold more than twelve million copies worldwide. Smith sang about heartbreak without holding back and without hiding the gender of the people he was singing to, something rare on major American radio stations at the time. The album earned four Grammy Awards in a single night and sealed his ticket straight to Hollywood studios.

Nobody saw such a sales surge coming.

Bond and the Melodrama Trap

Sam Mendes and the producers of the 007 franchise were looking for a voice capable of replicating Adele's commercial impact. In 2015, Smith co-wrote Writing's on the Wall with Jimmy Napes in a session that lasted barely thirty minutes. The orchestral piece dropped the frantic rhythm of the car chases in favor of an agonized falsetto that unsettled the spy's fans.

But fans responded at the record stores. The single became the first official Bond theme to reach number one on the UK sales charts, surpassing the records set by Shirley Bassey and Paul McCartney. That commercial triumph tied his name to the biggest blockbusters.

Because the filmmaker who designs a music video for Sam Smith usually works with pure cinematic codes. For I'm Not the Only One, she handed the screen to Dianna Agron and Chris Messina to shoot a domestic melodrama on sixteen-millimeter film. Smith barely appeared, singing under dim streetlights while the couple unraveled an infidelity in a medium shot.

Wardrobe as a Trench

After the phase of dark suits and introspective ballads came a bold aesthetic transformation. In 2019, he announced his non-binary identity and began a rethink of his stage presentation that alienated the more conservative radio programmers. The languid songs of The Thrill of It All gave way to theatrical, over-the-top, openly provocative pop.

In 2022, the single Unholy, recorded with Kim Petras, racked up more than a billion streams on Spotify before its first anniversary. For the music video, Smith hired director Floria Sigismondi, known for her work with David Bowie. The result was a dark cabaret number with latex corsets, baroque set design and a staging that shattered the image of the docile crooner from his early days.

And the business move paid off perfectly.

Greta Gerwig channeled that same energy in 2023 when commissioning Man I Am for the soundtrack of Barbie. The song was written from the satirical perspective of Ken, with synthetic basslines and hypermasculine backing vocals recorded at Abbey Road Studios. Smith used low vocal registers he had barely shown on his earlier studio recordings.

In 2024, Capitol Records released a reissue of his debut album with tracks recorded live at London's Roundhouse. The world tour tied to the album Gloria closed with ninety-two scheduled shows, a payroll of sixty dancers and a Solid State Logic mixing desk set up to handle sound pressure of one hundred and five decibels in indoor arenas.