Sam Smith Is Engaged to Christian Cowan — and Named the New Album After Cowan's Eyes

In October 2022, Sam Smith told GQ U.K. they were finished discussing their romantic life in public. “I've decided that I will always keep that private now,” they said, in remarks People revisited this week — going on, a couple of sentences later, to explain why: “I think being loved by someone is such a gift – for yourself. And I think my job can get in the way of that – the purity of that love – sometimes.”

So much for always. Smith is engaged to the fashion designer Christian Cowan, a fact they gave up to the New York Times — “with a giddy smile,” per the paper — in an interview published Tuesday. The album that arrives on August 21 is called Hazel Eyes, and it is named after the color of his.

The Times also carries a detail most of the follow-up coverage buried: Smith left England and moved to New York for Cowan. As relationship gestures go, relocating your life across an ocean is a fair distance beyond a ring.

Why this is a bigger deal than a standard engagement item. Our read of the back catalogue: Smith built a global career on wanting people who weren't there, and Stay With Me is a plea, not a love song. The new record's opening track, “Everlasting Love,” was begun the evening before the pair's first date and finished, in the Times' phrase, “deep in coupledom” — and Smith has described it as their first time writing about requited love, a line the paper notes they used on stage in San Francisco earlier this year rather than in the interview.

We'd call that a genuine career pivot rather than a press-release beat. By the Times' account it is also the first one Smith has controlled outright — made away from the songwriting teams and the rounds of A&R notes, with collaborators including Feist, a dozen tracks, a full gospel choir and a more handmade sound.

In remarks from the same interview reported by E! News, Smith put the record in a plainly political frame. “For me, there's something radical about being queer in this time, in this world, and singing love songs,” they said. “I'm not going to allow the poison that I read and that I see to affect my way of loving.”

Where the interview happened. Part of it was conducted over fizzy waters and then martinis at Julius', which the paper calls a historic Greenwich Village gay bar and one of Smith's favorite hangouts. Our own view: if you're going to explain why a city unlocked you, doing it in that room rather than a hotel suite is most of the argument. “Being in New York, I'm not the only freak on the street,” Smith told the paper. “I'm surrounded daily by people that are too much. And I mean too much as a compliment.”

Where it started. People reports the two were first seen out together in December 2022, in a photograph with Joe and Jill Biden at the White House, where Smith had performed at the celebration marking the Respect for Marriage Act being signed into law. A couple whose first public sighting was at the signing of federal marriage protections is now engaged. We're not going to gild that.

They didn't confirm the relationship until May 2024, at the Met Gala, in coordinated looks Cowan designed. He told Vogue then that the metal-plated roses worked into the outfits pointed back to the start: “Early on in our days, I gave Sam a metal-plated rose. So it was a nod to that moment.” They repeated the trick at this year's Met Gala in May, with Cowan calling the design on Instagram “a love letter to the king of fashion illustration, and to my love, Sam” — an Erté homage he counted out at 255,000 crystals and beads and 2,000 hours of hand sewing.

Our read. Smith spent a year and a half not confirming this relationship and, on the evidence, spent it writing about him instead. There's a particular pleasure in watching an artist whose whole register was beautiful sadness decide to try happiness, and do it loudly at a moment when a lot of people would rather they didn't. Hazel Eyes, Smith's fifth studio album, is out August 21.