Track Review: Sam Smith & Kim Petras, “Unholy”

Nobody keeps a hit in their back pocket like Sam Smith. Ever since they first exploded onto the scene with the double-whammy of the house-indebted “Latch” (with Disclosure) and the instant classic “Stay with Me,” Sam has experienced their fair share of duds and smashes like any premiere pop star. Enter the Kim Petras-assisted “Unholy,” the lascivious anthem that’s been ruling TikTok for weeks on end.

“Unholy,” the first collaboration between Sam and German pop singer Kim Petras, is Sam’s first proper single following the convoluted rollout for Love Goes and that album’s muddled greatness. As the lead single for their upcoming fourth studio album, “Unholy” updates the specific knack for melody that helped Sam enrapture audiences worldwide almost a decade ago.

The track, which marks the convergence of Sam’s regular collaborators (Jimmy Napes, Ilya) and one of today’s most prolific pop producers in Omer Fedi (“That’s What I Want“; “STAY”), finds Sam and Kim trading verses about a married father giving into lustful temptation at “the body shop.” “Unholy” leans into its inherent campiness through its comically choral intro and Sam’s head-nun-in-charge delivery of “dirty, dirty boy” in the first verse. Melodically, Sam hasn’t delivered an uptempo earworm like this since “Omen” or “How Do You Sleep.”

The song’s TikTok-centric path to release guaranteed its resounding success, but that path, unfortunately, robbed us of a bridge that would truly round it out. The track’s 2:36 runtime results in a sort of muted dynamism; there simply isn’t enough time for the song to build to a proper climax. Nonetheless, the warmth of Sam’s riffs offset the steeliness of the song’s hyperpop-informed production, and his harmonic conversations with Kim offer small, but mighty, pockets of bliss.

It’s rare to find songs so innately aware of their campy debauchery, but “Unholy” wears it proudly.

Score: 73