In the blink of an eye, Myles Smith had made it. The 26-year-old from Luton went viral on TikTok last spring with his catchy covers of chart-topping mega hits, before his own song “Stargazing” – a barn-shaking pop-hoedown about love – took off, notching up over half a billion streams on Spotify and cracking the UK Top 10. Barack Obama spun the track on his summer playlist and Smith won a Brit award, along with 23 million monthly listeners on Spotify. Now, he’s supporting Ed Sheeran on a global tour. Piece of cake.
Not quite. This picture of slingshot success is, as always, only an illusion: a mirage made up of pixels and internet hype. The facts are true – “Stargazing” did go viral, Smith did win the Brit Rising Star award, and the former US president is, in fact, a fan – but what looks like a lightning flash of destiny is really the result of years spent grinding, not to mention the start of more to come.
“I wish it was as magical as an overnight switch, but it didn’t feel quick,” he says, laughing over a video call. “For me, I’m 15 years in.” One inevitable question arises: so, what next? Often from here, the supposed aim is to parlay that viral moment into another, into another, into another. But Smith has other plans. (That said, his follow-up single, the fiddle-twanging “Nice to Meet You”, also went viral.)
“So many decisions that I’ve made have been because I didn’t want it to be one song and done, or one song followed by capitalising with every single opportunity to make money,” Smith says. “I’ve made some really bad financial decisions and turned down really great opportunities because I don’t want to just disappear overnight.” He’s seen enough artists thrown on the pop music’s ever-growing scrapheap to know he wants something more. “For lack of a better term, I s*** myself every day thinking about it.”
It’s a mindset that has served him well so far. Smith’s fans, over 1.5 million of whom follow him on TikTok, are not going anywhere, patiently anticipating a sunny new earworm to soundtrack their summers. Good things come to those who wait, and later this month, Smith will release his new seven-track EP A Minute, A Moment.
Smith has in the past been described as the next Ed Sheeran. Like “the ginger prince”, Smith makes music that balances his natural intimacy with stadium-ready sound. That chart-topping equilibrium is all over his new record: it’s boot-stomping pop that skips into your ear canal and right up to your brain, taking its cues from the blockbuster folk of Mumford and Sons and the widescreen optimism of Coldplay.
“My First Heartbreak” is a little different. The lead single from his EP tells the story of Smith’s father leaving when he was young. “They say blood is thicker than water/ But I’m closer to the ocean than to you,” sings Smith. His voice is breathy, fluttering over placid guitar playing before it dissipates altogether – a dandelion coming apart in the breeze.
Smith wrote it after a conversation with his brother. “He asked me, ‘Bro, have you ever thought what it would be like to be a father one day?’” recalls Smith. “I remember at that moment there was this sort of vacancy, loss, and stillness. It had such a profound impact on both of us: how are we supposed to become someone that we’ve never seen? Follow a blueprint that’s never been laid for us. That was the embers of the song.”
The song, though, came later. First, Smith spiralled. “I was going out more and drinking more, hurting those I loved more,” he says. “I was going down a dark hole with it. That conversation opened up all these questions: Was it my fault? Had I put an onus on my brother to play the father role? Was I expecting my mum to have stopped something that she couldn’t possibly have stopped? I was having all these teenage revelations quite late in life.”
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Smith’s mum, his go-to sounding board when it comes to music, cried when he played it for her. “She walked out of the room halfway through and a few minutes later, she comes back and says she can’t listen to the song,” he recalls. “That happened two or three times.” The first time she listened to it the whole way through was at a gig. “We caught up after; she sobbed and told me it was a beautiful piece of work,” says Smith.
His fans feel the same. The comments on YouTube are filled with people pouring their hearts out, sharing their own stories of absent parents and feelings of abandonment. On some nights, Smith will look out into the crowd at a gig and see people crying as he plays it. On the visceral impact he has on his fans (more than a few have told him his music has saved them), Smith is bashful. “As musicians, all we do is push air – it’s everyone else [in the crowd] that is doing the emotional hard work.”
Growing up in Luton, he was incredibly close to his mother. She was into Motown, filling the house with the sounds of Whitney Houston and Luther Vandross. “Somehow, that equalled me getting into Green Day and screamo,” laughs Smith. But as his siblings discovered R&B, he found himself leaning to pop. “I loved what Ed Sheeran was doing, but I looked nothing like this ginger guy from Ipswich and so I just couldn’t see that being me,” Smith says. His outlook changed when Labrinth arrived on the scene. “Then we had this Black guy coming through making pop music and it seemed possible.”
Smith, who lives in Brighton now, still takes umbrage with the routine headlines declaring Luton the worst place to live in the UK. “Anyone can look to statistics and draw assumptions, but when you dive beneath the analytics and look at the anecdotal experience of people living there, it’s different,” he says. “Most kids growing up in Luton go through that battle: do we believe the statistics or our actual lives? You’re pretty much getting a global experience within a 15-mile radius.” Every year, he’d celebrate Eid with his Muslim friends. On the weekends, he’d play gigs at his local Irish pub. It was a South American family down the road who taught him Brazilian drums.
It’s partly why his music has such a broad appeal. “I didn’t grow up thinking I want to make music for London or even the UK because my friendship group aren’t necessarily from here,” explains Smith.
In conversation, Smith is low-key and easy to talk to. His short black hair is dyed blond at the tips like a fuzzy halo. At the Brits last year, in his speech, Smith urged people to “protect” grassroots venues and encouraged labels to stick with artists past their first viral hit. The speech, he says, was because of his mum. “She always said to me, ‘Son, make sure wherever you go and whatever you achieve that you drop a ladder behind you,” he says. “And I want kids from Luton or other working-class towns, kids who look and sound like me, to be able to make pop music. If I can make even the smallest difference, then I’ll try my hardest to do so.”
Smith sees a gap in the UK music infrastructure. “There’s nothing in place right now to support the jump from being a bedroom creative to a musician with a sustained career,” says Smith, who counts himself lucky that he came up when he did. “Without a government-funded scheme, I would never have picked up a guitar. I happened to win the lottery because I was at school during a time when the Labour government wanted to invest in a plan.”
Speaking of plans, plenty of musicians will tell you that they have no backup plan. So fervent is their passion, so white-hot their ambition, that they simply cannot fathom a reality in which music is not their career. Smith, on the other hand, not only has a plan B but a plan C, too. After school, he studied sociology and social policy at Nottingham University, before going on to found a successful business management company. By the time he was 23, he was turning a healthy profit – all the while gigging and making music in the evenings.
But don’t take Smith’s diverse CV as a lack of passion or drive. Rather, the opposite is true. “Knowing that I could go on LinkedIn tomorrow and find a job gives me the freedom to explore music,” he says. It was when Smith felt sufficiently secure that he felt free to try music full-time. “I was lucky that I’d been able to get to a comfortable enough position in my career so that I could say, ‘Oh actually, this security and comfort is great, but it’s not worth sacrificing what I’m super passionate about right now,’” he says.
Smith thinks more aspiring musicians should consider stocking up their arsenal of life skills. He likens it to academy footballers. “You have people playing literally their entire lives and they’re great and then at 17, they’re dropped because of an injury – and then what happens?” he says. “I know others say differently, but I think going down the education route is so wise before getting into this world because it will save you half the problems that I see a lot of artists get themselves into.”
While Smith may keep a parachute in his back pocket, he has no intention of using it. It’s clear that his trajectory is aiming for altitude – not crash landings.
‘A Minute, A Moment…’ is out on 23 May
