To say Myles Smith ended 2024 on a high would be more than an understatement.
In December, the RCA UK-signed star solidified his status as the UK’s most hotly-tipped breakout act when the BRIT Awards 2025 revealed him as the winner of the BRITs Rising Star award supported by BBC Radio 1. This followed him being crowned BBC Introducing Artist Of The Year, listed on the Top 5 of Radio 1’s Sound Of 2025, and named Breakthrough Artist Of The Year by TikTok.
“It is a really good feeling, it puts the cherry on top of a long journey here,” he told Music Week last month, when reflecting on the whirlwind end to the year. “It’s been really nice to feel reassured, but also motivated, that I’m continuing in the right direction. If anything, it’s also just so nice to be acknowledged at a national level.”
There is no doubt that Smith – who currently has over 21 million monthly listeners on Spotify – is continuing in the right direction as he is now set to secure his second UK Top 10 with Nice To Meet You this week, the leading track of his second EP A Minute. Having originally debuted at No.12 at the end of 2024, the track is now heading towards No.6 in the UK Singles Chart, and has racked up over 58 million streams on Spotify as well as 143,281 sales (according to Official Charts Company data) to date.
This entry into the Top 10 will follow Smith’s debut UK Top 5 Stargazing, which peaked at No.4 after its release in May last year. The global hit – which is currently sitting at over 620 million streams on Spotify – was not only confirmed to be the biggest single of 2024 by a British act by the Official Charts Company, but also saw Smith become one of the first recipients of the Official Top 10 Award from the Official Charts. Stargazing has also surpassed the one million units mark (Official Charts Company data).
When talking to Music Week last year, however, the Luton-born singer-songwriter explained how he has been building on his career for years now.
“From the outside, it could look like my journey has been an overnight thing,” he explained. “But the reality of it is that I was playing pubs and open mics at 13 in Luton, then was in an indie band making bad music [laughs], then I went to university and started doing what I’m doing now. It didn’t happen straight away.”
Smith experienced his first break into the music industry in 2022 when covers of Amber Run’s I Found and The Neighbourhood’s Sweater Weather gained traction on TikTok.
“I remember not believing it, but that was the beginning of a constant stream of videos that did really well,” he told Music Week in our On The Radar interview with him last year.
Smith went onto sign with RCA UK and released the first single of his 2024 debut EP You Promised A Lifetime, My Home, in October 2023.
“When this whole journey started, we had quite a lot of interest globally super early on and I wanted to see how much I could do alone,” he said, when speaking on his relationship with his label. “I didn’t plan on signing to a major, but RCA knew how to handle the cultural impact I wanted to have with care, honesty and authenticity. When meeting with [co-presidents] Stacey Tang, Glyn Aikins and the wider team, it was so clear to me that they were a label with a human heart.”
But despite his meteoric rise to stardom over the last 12 months with the release of his two EPs, the breakthrough success of Stargazing and his multiple accolades, Smith recently opened up to Music Week about how the pressure of being a rising artist is not something he struggles with.
“Pressure is a strange one, because we often create it for ourselves,” he explained. “But my value of success is not numbers or how many people are in a room. I guess it’s more, ‘Am I happy and am I being truthful in what I am doing?’ So for me, the pressure comes from maintaining my mental health and making sure my family are happy.
“And right now, I’m just excited to be back on the road, to tour, to release more music," he continued, when asked about what's next for the BRITs Rising Star. "And just keep ticking off those things, making myself happy, making sure it’s honest and authentic, and making sure my mum’s smiling – I don’t feel any pressure, I just enjoy writing music.”
