7 hours ago
11
You know what you’re getting with Myles Smith, an artist who set his musical stall out early on. Before he was the winner of the rising star award at the 2025 Brits, he started out at open mic nights, performing selections from the oeuvres of Mumford & Sons, Coldplay and Ed Sheeran, still his avowed biggest influences today. The last in particular proved so impactful on the Luton-born singer that he even plays one of those funny small-scale acoustic guitars that have long been Sheeran’s trademark.
You could therefore deride Smith as someone who is intent on piloting his way to the middle of the road – and who is also a little passe. In 2026, even the world of the nice-guy pop-folk singer-songwriter seems to have moved on a bit, its big names either a touch grittier and more obviously rooted in Americana (Noah Kahan, Jelly Roll), or more flamboyant and knowing (Benson Boone), or, at the very least, bolstered by a traumatic backstory that underpins their lyrics (Alex Warren). But if Smith’s approach is a callback to a past era, nobody seems to have informed the public. His 2024 breakthrough, Stargazing, went platinum in 16 countries; it’s still in the UK Top 100 nearly two years after its release, and the follow-up Nice to Meet You is also a platinum seller. A Minute, a Moment – Smith’s 2025 EP that lasted as long as most albums – sold half a million copies in the US alone.
Playing his debut album proper, it’s hard not to be struck by how indebted Smith still is to the artists he started out covering. From Mumford & Sons, he borrows the stompy bass-drum rhythms that drove I Will Wait or Little Lion Man, and an unfailing devotion to rousing sung-en-masse choruses. From Coldplay comes both a penchant for wordless, sing along vocal hooks – the guy never stops woah-oh-ohing, or indeed woo-ooh-hooing – and echoey big-room ambience, as if the songs are already booming around a vast arena.
And from Ed Sheeran he takes pretty much everything else, up to and including some of the themes of his songs. Much in the style of The A Team, Mary’s Song depicts a drug-addicted but good-hearted sex worker (despite her travails, the listener is assured, “she sings her song and it goes like do-do-do-do”). Dublin Lights, meanwhile, is a frightful bit of faux-Irish fiddle-de-dee about meeting an attractive young lady in the titular city – uillean pipes, “one more Guinness and kiss so sweet” etc – that you would compare to Ed Sheeran’s Galway Girl were it not for the fact that it makes Galway Girl sound as edgy and feral as the Pogues in the era when Spider Stacy used to keep time on stage by repeatedly smashing himself over the head with a metal beer tray. It turns out to have been co-written by Ed Sheeran, information it’s a bit hard to know what to do with. It’s like going to see the Bootleg Beatles and discovering Paul McCartney’s taking the tickets.
It should be pointed out that, frightful fiddle-de-dee notwithstanding, Smith does what he does pretty well. The melody of Dying Days is lovely and so is that of Heaven – even if it takes no imagination whatsoever to picture the latter sung by Chris Martin – and if you’re in the market for a rousing en-masse chorus, Hold Me in the Dark features a doozy. His lyrics, meanwhile, occasionally flicker into life when he moves away from the Sheeranisms and the boilerplate nice-guy pop-folk stuff (“follow your heart wherever it takes you”, “I need you like the air that I breathe”) and delves into his own background: the generational trauma resulting from growing up “in a fractured family” on My Mess; depression and medication on Sertraline. Grandma’s Place might be the best thing here, a sweetly affectionate portrait filled with nice details: the “smell of Dettol and oxtail soup”, the fear of spilling a J2O on his nan’s sofa.
You just wish a little more of him had worked its way into the music. As it is, it’s hard to see what Smith is actually bringing to the party, beyond an amalgamation of his favourite artists: not a note here suggests a man with an original idea in his head, or at the very least, a man capable of stepping out from under the shadow of his influences. Maybe he will one day. Until then, what you’re getting with Myles Smith is more of the same: music that might have been tailor-made for a world of algorithms, forever suggesting you listen to something that sounds like stuff you already know.
This week Alexis listened to
The Velvet Underground and Rico – Sunday Morning
A mysterious 7in that obviously isn’t by who it purports to be by, but that nevertheless offers a trombone-led ska take on the banana album’s opening track that’s entirely delightful.
