“Stargazing” singer wants to “become an album artist”

Years before Myles Smith broke through with his anthemic single “Stargazing,” he took his mother’s advice and focused on his education. He graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2019, started his own business at 19, and made it profitable by 23.

“I was making good money, but I wasn’t fulfilled,” Smith explains. “That was the moment when I realized I couldn’t dedicate years of my life to something that I knew I wasn’t really passionate about.” So he quit – and just two years later, the returns exceeded all his fears.

While he speaks with Billboard Performing from his home in Brighton, the 26-year-old singer-songwriter’s hit “Stargazing” peaked at No. 41 on the Billboard Hot 100 and No. 7 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in late June, and had garnered 61.2 million official on-demand streams in the U.S. as of June 27, according to Luminate. He was also announced as the opening act for select dates on Imagine Dragons’ upcoming fall tour and will fly to Australia and New Zealand in November to headline his own tour, which has sold out shows across Europe and North America.

Growing up in a Jamaican family in Luton, England, Smith consumed a wide range of genres: Reggae was a mainstay, but between his mother’s love of Whitney Houston’s “Million Dollar Bill” and his siblings’ indoctrination with Destiny’s Child, Ne-Yo and Justin Timberlake, he listened to a lot of R&B. His vibrant working-class neighborhood also exposed him to hip-hop and grime, but it was the music of the 2010s that really honed his songwriting skills. He writes the heartbreaking lyricism of Adele’s 21Ed Sheeran’s +Bryson Tillers Trap Soul and Mumford & Sons’ Babylon than four basic albums.

While working on his sound, he began uploading unfinished song snippets to TikTok. One of them caught the attention of Extended Play Group’s Eric Parker in the fall of 2022 while scrolling through his For You page. “It was a very sad song that hit me in a place that doesn’t usually hit me on TikTok,” Parker says. He immediately contacted Smith and began managing him in November of that year.

The two worked to build his fan base by combining his originals with striking covers of songs that reflected Generation Z’s penchant for nostalgia, including The Neighbourhood’s “Sweater Weather”. “Covers (were) an opportunity to find an audience that I thought would fit the music I would eventually make,” he explains.

With a growing online following, Smith released his own singles independently through Ditto Music in 2023, including early tracks like the driving “My Home” and the witty wordplay-fest “Solo” (his first UK chart hit). When he reached over four million monthly listeners on Spotify, Smith and Parker agreed it was time to look for a label deal. After meeting with dozens of potential partners, Smith signed a deal with RCA UK last January, in partnership with the US label.

“(My) incredible A&R Jaryn (Valdry) brought me to tears in a meeting because she saw me for who I really was,” Smith says. “I really liked (RCA’s) whole philosophy of growing over time and not being a flash in the pan.”

Two months later, Smith released his debut EP, You promised a lifetime. “Stargazing” — written in Malibu, California, shortly after he signed his deal — wasn’t due out until May. Fueled by Fireball shots, nachos and tacos, he and co-writers Peter Fenn and Jesse Fink had “eight or nine songs done” before Smith found a chorus melody so captivating it immediately sparked a search for complementary chords. The bulk of the song was written in 15 minutes, with the details of the verses finalized in the weeks that followed. And when the rest of his team heard it, they cemented his confidence in the impending hit.

“I come back to West Hollywood at two or three in the morning and play the demo from the day we recorded it through the speakers in the ceiling,” he recalls. “I remember my manager waking up on the couch and saying, ‘What is that?“Everyone in the house is running and jumping around. When my team – my harshest critics after my mother – gave me that honest reaction, I knew I was onto something.”

Soon after, they launched a month-long release of the song, culminating on May 10, to coincide with the start of his next tour. The first snippet he posted to TikTok on April 8 emphasized the intimacy of his guitar-backed singer-songwriter style, and each subsequent teaser featured more members of his team backing vocals and dancing to the song.

“It really works when you can bring people into the context of the song,” Smith says. “I’m Myles Smith, but I have a team and they’re my best friends. It’s a weird culture where everything revolves around the artist. Do you think I could do this without everyone around me? No way.”

The radio campaign for the song began across the pond, but Parker mentions that RCA wanted to make an immediate U.S. inroads. “They were very proactive, (which) was a good sign that they believed in the song as much as we did.” Her suspicions were correct: “Stargazing” has continued to perform at radio, debuting on the Adult Alternative Airplay chart on July 6 and reaching new highs on Alternative Airplay and Rock & Alternative Airplay.

As he breaks through, Smith sees himself as someone known for his body of work. “I want to be an album artist,” he insists. “You can only say so much in an EP or a single.” But more importantly, he wants to set an example of how the music industry is connected to the larger systems of oppression in the world.

“I don’t want to be used as a means to say, ‘We’ve done enough,'” he says of his success as a black singer-songwriter. “If anything, I want to be used as a question about why more Myleses don’t break through.”

A version of this story appears in the July 20, 2024 issue of billboard.