Album Review: My Mess, My Heart, My Life. by Myles Smith
The Luton singer’s debut is most alive inside his childhood home; the love songs filling its back half could belong to anyone.
Rooms keep expanding through 2025: a BRIT Rising Star, support dates for Ed Sheeran, and a half-time show at the NFL game in London. Everything’s built up from “Stargazing,” the phone-screen anthem that launched open-mic regular, with a BBC Introducing Artist of the Year mark into his resumé. Myles Smith—raised in Luton—onto the global stage on folk-pop perfectly suited for big rooms and choruses to crash back at you from the pit. The full-length, unlike anything he’s released before, demands more of the music than the singles, and the songs that call back to a damaged house have more weight than the later ones with a romantic bent.
Plates will fly, a door will slam, a sister will cry, and on “My Mess,” “A word can start a war.” A man will grab a boy’s shirt and leave bruises on his cheek, the boy, then thirteen and taking on “toe to toe” a father; the second verse lays bare the legacy, “Sorry I’m so goddamn indecisive/I was raised just to do as I’m told”. He’s tried to escape it with fresh clothes, cut-off friends and dyed hair; admitting roots run too deep for any of it to work, he and his father will share a confrontation on “Sertraline”—again with his dad the subject, “Blame it on my father’s side,” the antidepressant in a line next to nicotine and dopamine arriving like sentence delivered after years of rehearsal in a waiting room. He’ll look his mother in the eyes and see pain he can’t conceal; the fear of becoming something awful grips him tight.
Smith draws “Grandma’s Place” from the height of a child, all details staying grounded and homey, from the dead roses in front of the house where lights remained on, to shoes coming off at the door, to the scent of Dettol and oxtail stew, to the J20 served to him on the plastic-covered couch he must not spill. He will learn to cook by seven, sing by ten and his grandmother will cover his ears when his Dad yells “horrible things,” the rage on “My Mess” becoming an almost childlike recall of the woman who buffered it. He will watch the clock and ask when his mum will return; fifteen years later they’ll drift apart. He’ll try and call but no one will pick up; Aunt Jenny will deliver the news, “The blood isn’t reaching your heart” and the funeral that will arrive will be almost as swift as the shame that will follow the failed call he gave up on, him left “a boy in the dark,” not much more grown than he was on the plastic-covered couch.
On “Mary’s Song,” Smith shifts out of the personal. The portrait he renders is external, and a woman who is “One hand wrapped in the rosary/And the other one carrying the groceries/That she barely can buy.” It’s an impression in the roughest edges of the story, mother’s sickness and quick bills alongside the ride, “In the black c class/With the man that she met in the underpass”, two adult men inside doing sixteen and a life that changed for her at fifteen. The writing works well while it’s observational and solid; when Smith goes for a broader moral, “People judge/But they don’t even know her name,” it locks into how he’s decided to see Mary, even before she’s finished growing into a character, and a set of “Do do do do”s take the place of a chorus that had real stories filling it in the verses.
When the family exits, Smith’s heartbreak remains naked. “Hold Me in the Dark” desires rescue and dreams of jet planes, a lover to ward off the “demons in my head” and to “fix my soul.” “Hate You” fares better: a six-month on-again, off-again relationship where “Said that we’re just friends but/We know that it’s more.” She calls him, drunk; she wants to kiss him, “Feeding me stories and letting me down.” The chorus states, “Hate how much I want you/Hate how much I love you/Hate how much you don’t.” He acknowledges this, yet stays.
Love has freed Smith from the bedrock. The farther he drifts from home, the more these lines become universal. Aiming skyward, “Heaven” gathers fireflies and celestial love into a thousand lights, “Cos Heaven is you.” “Dying Days” gives over the entirety- breath, heart, and time to waste, all with a promise to “love you till my dying day.” “Lifetime” features a Davide Rossi string arrangement; it sets devotion against the clock. From the “heartbeat, countdown in my chest,” it shrinks forever until “I can only love you for a lifetime,” for “Time is a tornado that we’re running from.” Pretty, weightless images are ready for any wedding playlist, but bearing the weight of no specific life. The smaller declaration, “Cos I swear you’re perfect the way you are,” following the mother’s funeral and the father’s hand is made as generic as A hundred other singers.
Out on the town, Smith is trying to lose himself on the dance floor, and only one cut here has much substance. “Dublin Lights” feels like an ensemble piece. Co-written with Ed Sheeran and Steve Mac and loaded with cred—a roomful of Irish players, uilleann pipes, banjo, fiddle. Underneath it, the lyric is weak, a stranger in “Ripped up jeans and a new tattoo,” with one more Guinness for “Let’s get lost in the Dublin lights.” “Nice to Meet You” uses a similar meet-cute as “Dublin Lights,” where, one more drink away from leaving home, a woman says to him, “Feel the beat, forget that broken heart.” “Stay (If You Wanna Dance)” means business, tucking a working life into the come-on. “Long nights, stuck on low pay.” “That 9-5 don’t care about you. girl.” The dancing means something more when you have a Monday to escape.
“They say you know it when you know it/And I know,” sings Smith in “Stargazing,” and plainspoken certainty has always been the strong appeal of his established tracks. The Niall Horan duet “Drive Safe” boils down to goodbye: “Life is a road, don’t know what’s along the way/So drive safe.” “Gold” stands apart as the single with a blemish. It halfbegs, “I spent half my life/Begging on my knees/For a girl like you/To want a guy like me,” and half cracks up in an aside, “Imagine if this song just stopped and it came back in like.” This fracture in the shine is the only place the singles allow a glimpse of Smith’s raw writing. Against the background of a violent father and a grandmother whose hands once clamped a boy’s ears, these choruses just do their work and that’s it.
Above Average (★★★☆☆)
Favorite Track(s): “My Mess,” “Grandma’s Place,” “Sertraline”