Love is a many squalid thing, if Sam Smith is to be believed: empty whiskey and wine bottles and falling for straight men who are never going to love you back.

But it's also the only thing that mattered in a short concert of minor keys and major heartache where Smith introduced material from his second album The Thrill Of It All and teased his upcoming world tour.

"I'm going to pretend to be Beyonce," Smith said, promising a much larger production in November. It's hard to see how – he didn't give us much to dance to.

The tone was set from opener Lay Me Down, his high-range voice soaring over minimalist backing from piano and cello. Soul ballad I'm Not The Only One, also from Grammy-winning debut In The Lonely Hour, engaged the rest of the band but seemed similarly designed for pressing the audience back in their seats to marvel at his bravura vibrato.

The first offering from the new album was Midnight Train, which some have called a rip-off of Radiohead's Creep. Smith says it was written "after a massive bottle of whiskey" for a friend enduring a break-up – there are similarities, but it's hard to hold it against him when all I've made after a night on the sauce is a mess.

One Last Song, his latest single, is relatively upbeat and has echoes of Motown, but it was only for the platinum-plated Like I Can that the band began to strut and the audience were moved to their feet. "That is as happy as it gets. It's all downhill from here."

Said in jest, but true – fortunately Smith is good at being sad. Burning was based on the "f---ing nightmare" of being in love with a straight man; Palace traversed the ruins of a relationship, but even the incongruous jangle of guitar couldn't save "real love is never a waste of time" from slipping over the line from sweet to saccharine; Nirvana, from his debut EP of the same name, brought the drummer out of his reverie; the Disclosure-free version of breakthrough hit Latch was a sure-fire crowd-pleaser.

The one unabashedly happy love song in his oeuvre, Say It First, was charming, and morphed pleasingly into Stay With Me before finishing with No.1 hit Too Good At Goodbyes.

At just 13 songs, the 65-minute set left some expressing their disappointment online, and it's hard not to sympathise. A second hour of melancholy would have felt like infinite sadness, but another three or four songs would have left paying fans more satisfied.