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By the time you get to “Lay Me Down”, the tragically pleading epilogue that serves as an effective microcosm of the record, it’s all just a blur. Excepting the screeching, uptempo opener, “Money on My Mind”, the album hums along peddling the same sad song the same dejected way, and after some time it’s like taking your medicine: You know it’s good for you, but it’s a pain. Over time, it fails to resonate, sputtering like a skipping disc. While his voice is far and away one of the purest and most refined in recent memory, Smith never exerts himself to showcase it, staying in the same woeful wheelhouse. In the Lonely Hour is a soul album that traverses the same emotional depths as fellow UK soul crooner Daley’s Days and Nights did months ago but with far less variety of sound or subject matter. While his excursions into the mainstream exhibit his star power, he crawls inside himself on the album, reducing the impact of his timbre with forlorn uniformity. It saturates his art to the point of subduing his otherwise dazzling tone to pedestrian ranges. He longs for an impassioned connection, and that longing is evident throughout, aesthetically. (For a little perspective, there’s a song called “Life Support”.) Embrace is an appropriate word for this album Smith is constantly reaching out for someone, seeking to close the gap and provoke sensuality. In the former, he sings, “Now I got you in my space/ I won’t let go of you/ Got you shackled in my embrace/ I’m latching on to you.” In the Lonely Hour takes that sentiment to new heights. It would’ve been hard to forecast the murky depths that lied within In the Lonely Hour strictly relying on Smith’s contributions as a guest on Disclosure’s “Latch” and Naughty Boy’s “La La La” (soul records masquerading as pop/dance), but it would’ve been very easy to anticipate his affinity for togetherness. In the Lonely Hour only knows one way to spin its grand thesis. Its fatal flaw is not its singular mindset, but the monotonous execution of that mindset. It hums along at one bleak, naively hopeful tone that often loses affect. It’s musically stark, too, compressing chord progressions and melodies into subdued acoustic guitar and piano riffs draped occasionally in strings. It spends its time trying to minimize emotional space (for solidarity’s sake, Smith dreams about getting mugged outside a lover’s house), physical space (he wants to hold hands during a one-night stand), even relational space (he pushes a beau to leave another lover).

It wallows not because of isolation but because of a glaring lack of intimacy and empathy. In fact, it isn’t about loneliness at all it’s about the painful, unavoidable desire for suffocating closeness fostered by unrequited love. In the Lonely Hour, Sam Smith’s passionate major label debut, isn’t as much about loneliness as it is about distance.