Sam Smith

Love Goes

Love Goes is inspired and it’s genuine. It’s a confident declaration of how the passion and obsession of love for another can parallel the importance self-love.

Whilst Love Goes could have been an album containing only Smith’s newer dance sound, the album does offer something for all Sam Smith fans, to mixed results.

Smith delivers more of these familiar, emotional-pop crescendos designed to soundtrack sentimental feelings on and off the dancefloor.

The pop crooner’s third album is at times freer, queerer, and more enlivening than anything Sam Smith has done before, and yet too cautious to make what could’ve been a career-defining leap.

For the most part, the mood here is pensive, the ballads plentiful and the pace glacial, with little evidence of the wild abandon that the singer supposedly longs for.

Although there are dalliances here with buoyant, radio-friendly material, album three sees the star largely stick to their tried-and-tested break-up songs.

In ‘Love Goes’ Sam Smith has produced a flawed but decent return that mirrors the introspection of this strange, difficult year.

It makes for a record full of healing sounds to pull you past sorrow.

The pop titan returns with a post-breakup album that takes risks without quite putting itself out there.

The faintly cosmopolitan dance-pop grooves and finely measured ballads offer few unexpected turns. They're set apart more by a lack of gospel and soul, consequently rendering Love Goes plain by Smith's standard -- unfortunate for an artist whose instrument is anything but that.

Love Goes wallows too much in its comfort zone to be truly memorable.

Smith attempts to mix despair with euphoria on an album that delivers plenty of gloom but not much glitter.