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Myles Smith’s song Stargazing – a thumping pop-hoedown full of stadium-sized chants and euphoric romance – was one of the biggest hits by a British artist last year, racking up nearly 700m streams on Spotify, spending 40 weeks on the UK chart and breaking the US Top 20. It’s also up for song of the year at this weekend’s Brit awards, where Smith is also nominated for best new artist and best pop act, having already won this year’s Brits Rising Star award. Ed Sheeran is an admirer and confidant, and has booked him as support on a stadium tour, and Smith is no one-hit-wonder either: in January, the jaunty Nice to Meet You became his second Top 10 hit.
But the weirdest moment for him, he says, was when he recently rang up a utilities company to sort a new wifi deal. “They put me on hold, and it was Stargazing playing. Those are the types of things that still seem absolutely bizarre.”
At the Brits, he is up against big names such as Charli xcx and Dua Lipa in the pop category, but his music skews very differently, towards material relatively rarely explored by Black British pop artists. Animated acoustic guitars and banjos mean that it cleaves to the trend for pop-leaning country music as well as the barn-dancing “stomp-clap” style of Mumford & Sons and the Lumineers. But with pianos, ethereal production touches and Smith’s open-hearted yet bruised vocal style – plus plenty of whoa-oh-ohs – the likes of Sheeran, Coldplay and Hozier are clearly touchstones too, and even dance music fans will be endeared to his insistent beats and big breakdowns.
With abundant emotional intelligence as well as a keener political acumen than most pop singers his age, the 26-year-old Smith is sharp and engaging company on a video call as he tours the UK. Born and raised in Luton, he casts himself as a small-town oddball. “I grew up in a working-class neighbourhood, in a Jamaican family – so my interest in rock and screamo, and not being able to play football and rugby, instantly put me in a different category to my peers,” he says. “In all walks of life I’ve felt a little bit different.”
His parents’ marriage fell apart when Smith was between the ages of nine and 13, “a critical period in anyone’s life when they’re forming relationships,” he says. Introducing a song to his 1.6m TikTok followers recently, he wryly said: “Anyone else’s parents divorce and then your dad leaves and then your whole perception of love and relationships is completely screwed up and you don’t know how to trust anyone in your adult life?”
“A lot of my personal development has been off the back of that [divorce] experience,” he says now. “I definitely had trust issues for a while.” He has had therapy – “such a beautiful tool” – to come to terms with it. “At the time [as a child] you’re never really aware – most of the learning comes when you’re an adult and you start to unpack the ways you think and feel. There’s a weird beauty to it – while it is painful and traumatic, and having to relive so many experiences is difficult, it also gives you this key to unlock a whole new side to yourself, when you do understand yourself better. And I’ve got a lot of [the trauma] to thank for being a good songwriter!”
Smith left Luton for the University of Nottingham to study sociology, and founded his own fast-growing business management company after graduating. But he’d been playing pub gigs since the age of 11, and decided to pivot to music, “knowing that if it all went wrong I could reactivate my LinkedIn and get back into the working world,” he laughs. “But those initial months were petrifying, stepping from a stable income to absolute uncertainty.” He started posting songs to TikTok in 2022, where his manager discovered him, and was signed to a major label deal with Sony the following year.
But I can hear the sociology student still coming through when he discusses the systemic issues that can hold people like him back in the music industry. “For anyone from a working-class town, the opportunities to get into music are few and far between,” he says. “There’s a huge disadvantage when it comes to access to musical equipment, and even music lessons, at state school level.”
Smith benefited from Building Schools for the Future, an investment scheme brought in by Labour in 2005, then shuttered in 2010 by Michael Gove – who later regretted doing so – as the Tories’ austerity programme began. “I had access to GarageBand, iMacs, musical equipment,” Smith remembers. “And though the costing could be questioned, [the scheme] was very quickly pushed out the window. We’ve now seen years and years of austerity, and it’s not just the arts that have taken a hit – it’s anything that sits on the periphery of the mainstream route to work. There do need to be questions asked about how we’re valuing the arts in this country.”
Exacerbating the problem are the hardships faced by grassroots venues, which have been knocked hard by the Covid lockdowns and then the cost of living crisis. “Suddenly the gap between music being a hobby and being a career is wider than ever. In order to pay for a first show an artist might need to sell 500 tickets [at a medium-sized venue]. Whereas the bands and shows I used to see when I was younger was someone down the pub playing to 20 people, but those don’t exist any more.” And he sees a “dual burden” for people of colour, who as well as being statistically more likely to be working class, “are also not being seen for the amazing cultural value that they bring to this country, and what they add to one of our biggest cultural exports” – namely the arts. “More work needs to be done both on a class basis and a race basis.”
His music tends to be much less political, and is written in a way that allows listeners to map their own troubles and breakthroughs on to his songs. They frequently contact him to tell him so, and on social media, Smith recently reminded them: “It wasn’t my music that saved you – it was you.”
“A lot of people – and I really do appreciate it – will message me when they’re going through troublesome times,” he explains. “They’re dealing with mental health issues – or much further. I could take it as an ego lift: ‘Wow, I’m saving lives!’ But the reality is that those people are doing the hard work to really understand themselves. As an artist, I never want to put a false sense of myself into the world, where I am this saviour. I push air – that’s my job.”
As he hones his craft, Smith says he’s mindful to “take breaks from writing for a few months at a time, so I can go out and experience life, otherwise I’ll have nothing to say,” and also avoiding “external [musical] influence – I’m trying to find who I am, what I’m trying to say.” But time with Sheeran has been useful, seeing how “he has full confidence over his initial ideas. For me and many other songwriters, you can get stuck going over one line for 45 minutes. But he’s of the mindset that if it’s good, it’s good – why are we wasting time?”
After the Brit awards, Smyth has 37 gigs to play across Europe, the US and Australia – all before the end of May, when he starts 29 European stadium shows with Sheeran. It sounds exhausting, but he is clearly exhilarated. “I wrote a song recently about simply feeling good,” he says. “On the surface that could seem super cliched. But it’s taken a long time to just feel great, and not feel burdened with anything. That’s a byproduct of doing the thing that I love. Feeling good – that’s something I’ve been feeling recently!”
