I was finding this whole 'being Jorja Smith' thing a bit difficult

I was finding this whole 'being Jorja Smith' thing a bit difficultIt’s been quite the journey for the Walsall singer, but right now she’s on a huge high and back in London to celebrate the release of her new album with a massive outdoor partyJorja Smith wants to move locations. We’ve met in a proper London caff off Caledonian Road, the type where the only tea on offer is builders and the only woman in the building is the one taking the full English breakfast orders. My presence at one of the tables has already been noted, and Smith’s arrival — all smiles in a cropped orange T-shirt, jorts and a perfectly slicked-back bun, her skin glowing in the July sun — is even more conspicuous. People are looking and privacy doesn’t feel guaranteed. “There’s a little courtyard outside the place where we’re doing rehearsals, do you wanna go there?” she asks me gently in her perfectly preserved Walsall accent, picking up on the vibe. While chatting en route, we pass a young man on a Lime bike whose eyes widen with recognition as he rolls past, dumbstruck. Once settled, Smith tells me about this time last year, when the parks were similarly scorched and the majority of London had forgotten what it felt like to have ever worn a jacket. The singer-songwriter, now 29, was preparing to return to the city for a short stint in the studio. It was a quest to reunite with east London-based producer and Beyoncé collaborator Richard Isong, aka P2J. Isong and Smith had worked together once before, on the UK funky-infused earworm Little Things, which spent 11 weeks in the UK Top 20 and was nigh-on inescapable for the entirety of summer 2023. It was a partnership practically begging to be repeated.When Smith arrived at Isong’s studio in Bethnal Green, she thought she would leave with a four-track EP. Two days passed. “I went to my label’s office, and I was like, ‘Guys, I think this is an album. I don’t think it’s a little dance project. Like, this is serious,’” she says, her nails clacking together as she makes the point. As it turns out, Isong had a whole Pandora’s box of beats ready for Smith. “When he played everything, I was just like, ‘Wait, wait, wait, wait, this is sick.’ And if I hear something and I love it, I always want to sing. We listened to literally one song, and I was like, ‘OK, let’s get the mic out and sing.’” Once Smith picked up the mic, she couldn’t stop. “I had a friend that was like, ‘Oh, why are you putting this out?’”The result is What are the Odds, a dizzying, addictive array of club tracks that feel as if they were Bluetoothed straight to the summer 2026 airwaves via someone’s old Sony Ericsson. It’s a notable departure from the sound Smith usually adopts on her LPs, which lean towards melodic R&B and neo-soul. Fans were first notified of the new album’s direction via What’s Done is Done, a pure UK garage heater with a snake-charming hook released as Smith’s lead single in May. “JORJA BACK IN HER DANCE BAG,” reads the top comment on Smith’s Instagram clip of the song. But it will take until tomorrow’s release day (August 21) for fans to realise the full extent of Smith’s dance pivot, something she’s keen to see the reaction to. “You know, someone might listen to this and be like, ‘Oh, where’s the ballad? I want a ballad.’ Just bear with me,” she smiles, her hand outstretched in the way you signal someone to wait. I counter that she already has plenty of ballads, and Smith agrees. “I had a friend that was like, ‘Oh, why are you putting this out?’,” she mewls in a mock baby voice. “And I’m like, ‘Just go and put Lost & Found on then! Leave me alone.’” For her part, Smith has been revelling in the new sound. “With this project I had this really excited, fun feeling… just this energy, and it literally is still there. It’s been ever since that first studio session. I’ve been like on a high. It’s like the sun has been shining constantly in me,” she beams.11 age she first started writing her own music and posting covers to YouTube 2017 year she worked with Drake on two songs from his hit mixtape More Life20 age when her debut album Lost & Found was released3 peak chart position of Lost & Found2019 year she won a BRIT award for Best British Female Artist and was nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys2 projects worked on with P2J, the producer behind smash hit single Little Things and Smith’s new dance-focused albumTen years have passed since the release of Smith’s debut single Blue Lights. Does she feel like much has changed? “Do you know what’s mad? I feel how I did when I first started,” she says. “Just excited, like a teenager again.” I joke that she’s living her Teenage Fantasy, as per the title of her 2017 track. “Well, I’m an adult now, so I need to be an adult. I got shit to do. Bills to pay,” she reasons. What about living her Adult Fantasy, then? “Adult fantasy sounds like a f***ing sex shop,” she says, cackling. Full circle moment aside, a lot has happened in the decade since Smith burst onto the scene. The success of Blue Lights was enough to capture the attention of Drake, who featured Smith on two tracks from his 2017 mixtape More Life, introducing her airy, emotive voice to the masses. Bolstered by this momentum and sitting on a trove of unreleased music, Smith asked her manager if she could put out an album. “He was like, ‘Yeah, pick your songs,’” she recalls. “I didn’t have to write an album. I just put songs together.” Smith was just 20 years old when she released Lost & Found, which debuted at number three on the UK albums chart. It earned her the Brits Critics’ Choice Award (now known as the Rising Star Award) and was nominated for the 2018 Mercury Prize. PAThis entire period is a blur to Smith, who still cannot quite believe what she went through, and that she was so young. I ask what felt like the biggest headf*** moment. “I went on tour with Bruno Mars for seven weeks,” she says, remembering how the majority of her travel experience up until that point had been “UK holidays and caravan parks”. Smith’s base at this point was in London — first with her aunt in the south, then her own flat in the west — but the unrelenting pace of her work life meant she never really settled in the city. Her love for London was already waning by the time the lockdowns came. “It was Covid that made me like, ‘Why am I here?’” she says. “I’d lived here for eight years. And got all wrapped up in the travelling part of this industry, which is f***ing weird; I just needed to go back home and set my feet down.” This ongoing love-hate relationship with the capital has become the topic of new track This City, which features a special re-recorded verse from Devlin’s 2010 grime classic London City. “I’ll reveal it in my words I lost the passion,” Smith sings. “Simply it was best when I had nothing / Hard to know the cost when you have everything.” The lockdowns came and went, and the world reopened with Jorja Smith still in London. In addition to the suffocating nature of the capital, she struggled with how fans would approach her, in real life and online. “After Covid, it felt a bit like I was just… a ‘thing,’” she says, “and that people could say what they wanted to me, ask for a picture, things like that, but it didn’t make me feel appreciated.” I mention a recent interaction that went viral online with Harry Styles and a fan who shoved a camera in his face, only for him to pointedly retort, “Hello, I’m Harry, nice to meet you.” “I’ve had that before,” Smith says wearily, “it’s so like…” She stops herself, measuring her response, before reasoning: “This is what comes with it.”“I’m a small-town girl. I need to escape to a place where I can see the sky”She returned to Walsall in 2022 to work on her sophomore album, Falling or Flying, and bid farewell to London seemingly for good. There, she went for long, meandering dog walks and enjoyed the uninterrupted skyline. “I’m a small-town girl,” she explains. “I need to escape to a place where I can see the sky without everything being so crowded together. It’s overstimulating. I want to see the sky. I want to touch the grass. I like the outdoors a lot. I love my walks. I don’t want to hear f***ing beeping horns.” Smith also noticed that her fame did not precede her so much in Walsall. “That’s what I like about being home. Because everyone knows everyone. If I know you, I actually know you.” Being home also allowed her to set up the Blue Lights Choir, a charity group that supports young girls in the area who are looking to develop their voices, eventually get into the music industry, or simply join a community. “It’s their family away from their family,” Smith smiles. In 2023, as she geared up for Falling or Flying’s release, Smith began the requisite process that now surrounds releasing any body of work: videos, social content, interviews. Online, people openly and cruelly dissected her weight. “I had been doing a lot [of being visible] in that period and I needed to step back,” she remembers. “I was finding this whole ‘being Jorja Smith’ thing a bit difficult.” Not only that, but second album pressure had proven hard to shake. “At one point I remember being like, ‘F***, I’m not a breakthrough artist, I’m not a new artist anymore,’ and it really hit me.” Fortunately, Walsall was there as a place to retreat to when needed.Jorja Smith performs during a concert in ParisAFP/GettyThis album cycle is being widely heralded as Smith’s big “return”, but any true Jorja Smith fan (or casual peruser of her Spotify and Instagram pages) would know that she’s been releasing music and appearing on stage pretty consistently since day dot. I raise this misconception with her, and she looks visibly relieved. “It’s a question that everyone asks me! Like, ‘Oh, you took a break,’ and I’m like… ‘No?’” she says, looking puzzled. “I don’t know why I get so annoyed at this because in the other interview I had yesterday they said it and I’m like… ‘Guys, I have performed every year. Check my Excel sheet, like check my master tour doc. I’ve been on stage every year!’ But I realise that if you’re not out at events, that’s what people think. I guess my presence was missing online, even though I’ve still been on stage.” She says it makes her a bit defensive, “because I love touring and I love doing shows, but I guess not everyone sees that. People don’t see what you don’t show.” Now, she’s in a period where she’s “enjoying posting a bit more” and says that the weight of this album cycle feels entirely different. While she looks back on the past wishing she had protected herself a little more, she ultimately reasons: “We’re here now, everything happens for a reason.” Smith applies a similar logic to the song she wrote for No Time to Die, the final instalment of Daniel Craig’s run as James Bond. It was passed over in favour of Billie Eilish, which left it sitting in a vault for over five years (“I have a lot of songs just sat there,” she says). That is until Riz Ahmed came along searching for a song for his 2026 TV series Bait, which follows an actor whose life is upended after the press mistakenly reports that he’s the 007 frontrunner. “It’s sick because Bait was about someone not being Bond,” Smith says. “Things are meant to be, and it was meant to be for this.” “I’m definitely living my best life”Smith couldn’t be further from Bond ballads right now either. True to the album’s sound, she’s been dancing, partying and thriving. “I’m definitely living my best life. I don’t think I’ve said that out loud yet,” she says. “That’s where I’m at right now. There’s so much seriousness in the world; I just want to have a bit of fun.” She’s also fallen back in love with London — the unexpected byproduct of how much fun she had creating the album — and is currently splitting time between the capital and Walsall. When we speak, she’s about to jet off to Mexico City to support Harry Styles for his six-night residency. “It’s really cool because it is so rare to be on tour in one place. I want to go see some wrestling. And eat loads of food,” she smiles. Once she’s back, there are two significant dates in the diary: this Friday, Smith will headline All Points East as part of a release day celebration for What are the Odds. She’s got a few tricks tucked up her sleeve, including a surprise performance with the girls from the Blue Lights Choir, and potentially a special guest. Then she’s back to Walsall for a special Spotify Hometown show, which she says feels “incredibly special”. More than just a show, Smith hopes the concert will “inspire the next generation to believe that big things really can come from Walsall”. Smith is clearly the happiest she’s been in a long time. I can feel the internal glow she talked about practically radiating out of her pores, her smile only pausing in moments when she wants to make a serious point or carefully consider her phrasing. We certainly haven’t been short of heat in the capital, but being around someone this genuinely fulfilled is like basking in a different type of sunlight. That’s the real Jorja Smith effect. And even if the journey here hasn’t been entirely smooth, it’s all a part of her mantra. “Life’s only understood backwards,” she assures me. That sounds like a lyric, I say. “It’s not. I saw it on Tumblr,” she laughs.