It's been a loooong while since the release of Sam Smith's Grammy Award-winning 2014 debut, In the Lonely Hour, but the crooner's finally ready to drop sophomore follow-up The Thrill of It All. The album will hit stores on November 3, and while that might feel like an agonizing wait, we've got more than a few delicious details with which to tie us over.

Here's what we know:

Smith's been dropping hints since summertime
While lead single "Too Good at Goodbyes" didn't land until September, Smith had already begun to tease the video in July. He also revealed that he was working with director Luke Monaghan for the visual.

Then, in August, the balladeer officially announced his new material with a letter to fans on Twitter.

This album started with "Him"

In an interview with Zane Lowe, Smith revealed that he started writing the record two years ago with a particular mood in mind. "So I was writing this album in 2015 on tour," he said. "I wrote 'Him' on tour in Sydney. I wrote about 10 or 13 songs before the Oscars." Then following the awards show and a vacation in Amsterdam, he hit the studio hard with longtime collaborator Jimmy Napes.

The album includes new collaborations

Yup, you can expect to hear the likes of Malay, Timbaland and most importantly, PooBear in the next era.

"PooBear, to me, helped me write the song that was the core [of the new album], which is called 'Burning'," Smith told Zane Lowe. Smith also recorded a handful of tracks with a gospel choir, giving the new material a different edge.

"Pray" was inspired by a trip to Iraq

While some have speculated Smith's relationship with religion inspired his new album's second release, "Pray," he told Billboard that it was an eye-opening trip to Iraq and work with charity War Child that spawned the song.

“I spent five days in Mosul and came back ­embarrassed that I had known so little about the world and other people’s lives,” he told the magazine. “I went back to that great Nina Simone quote, that it is important to speak about the times you live in. I hadn't done that; I’d just written a bunch of songs about love. So I wanted to write about how I’m now starting to open my eyes, at 25, to what is going on in the rest of the world, and that it’s not always pretty.”

Smith will definitely hit the road in 2018

You can grab tickets to U.S. and European dates now via his website.

Smith's donating profits from Sydney gig to Australian marriage equality

The Sydney Morning Herald reported that Smith will donate more than a third of the profits from his January 2018 show at the Sydney Opera House toward efforts to support same-sex marriage in Australia as well as additional services that support the LGBTQ community in the country.

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