It is a sticky, sweltering July afternoon, and I have accidentally found myself at a wake with Jorja Smith. I’m told that the pub where we have met, in the leafiest part of leafy south-west London, is usually a safe bet for an inconspicuous table. But today, sweaty black suits carrying pints drift between tables, and long queues snake round the bar.
Dressed in a simple tank top, bare-faced with her hair scraped back, Smith is waiting for me when I arrive. “I’ve been waiting for my drink for ages,” she says. “But I feel bad saying anything because, you know …”
The sombre mood doesn’t last long – in large part because Smith is effortlessly funny. When her alcohol-free sparkling wine finally arrives, she takes one sip, pauses for the waitress to disappear, then winces theatrically. “Oh,” she says. “That’s not good.” Every time we dissolve into laughter, I glance around guiltily, like we’re schoolgirls trying not to get caught talking at the back of assembly.
It’s hard to imagine a less appropriate setting in which to discuss an album made for sunburnt block parties and 2am raves. What Are the Odds, the 29-year-old’s third album, released this week, is a certified, old-fashioned ass-shaker. Made with Richard Isong – the London producer better known as P2J, whose credits include Beyoncé, Burna Boy and Tems – and featuring the likes of Wizkid and Devlin, it is a vibrant collage of Black British dance music, weaving together UK garage, funky house, 2-step and Afrobeats, into a 12-track collection that pulsates from top to bottom.
While dance music has always been threaded through Smith’s catalogue, usually in the form of a summer single – On My Mind in 2017, Little Things in 2023 – she is better known for her introspective, soulful R&B, as epitomised by her 2016 breakout single Blue Lights (which NME praised as “a fantastically introspective and clever piece of songwriting”, and had critics declaring her Amy Winehouse’s successor). This is the first time she has committed fully to the dancefloor.
“I just love dancing,” Smith shrugs. “I like going out to listen to music, a lot of my friends are DJs. It’d be nice to hear more of my stuff when I’m outside.”
The genesis of this album was different to her previous records. Her Mercury prize-nominated debut album, Lost & Found, emerged because she felt it was time to make an album. Its successor, Falling Or Flying, arrived because she felt she “needed” a second one. What Are the Odds was made almost accidentally, which is perhaps why it feels so light on its feet.
After making the effervescent club single Little Things with P2J, the pair initially planned to write a dance EP. But the songs kept coming, and the project outgrew itself. “We went through nine songs in the first two days,” Smith says, her eyes widening again at the memory. “I turned up to the studio and he’d made all this music from our conversations. I left and went straight to my label and said: ‘I think this is an album, not an EP. This is serious.’ I’m so excited about it.”
The album may be created for the dancefloor, but its emotional resonance remains unmistakably Smith. For Life mourns losing a friend to addiction; Young Heart is a love letter to Smith’s younger self; The Way It Was meditates on the end of a friendship. “If you just sang the songs with keys or piano,” she says, “they’d all probably be quite sad.”
It is tempting to read What Are the Odds as a comeback album. In the weeks before its release, various headlines have announced Smith’s “return”. When I begin to ask her about this supposed break, she cuts in incredulously. “People keep saying, ‘Oh, you’re back!’ What do you mean, back? I’ve been on tour since 2017. When people say that, I’m like … [you should] check my calendar! People are likely talking about a ‘comeback’,” she says, “because I’m back on social media. I take breaks, and I’m not always out at events and things.”
It’s an astute observation, and one that cuts to the heart of Smith’s unconventional relationship with celebrity. Since Blue Lights announced her arrival as an 18-year-old in 2016, she has become one of British music’s defining voices: a Mercury and Grammy nominee, double Brit award winner, and a featured artist capable of surfacing everywhere from Drake’s More Life to Burna Boy’s African Giant. Yet, she has never cultivated the kind of omnipresent celebrity that feels almost compulsory in the social media age, where visibility seems synonymous with existence. There are no carefully choreographed glimpses into her morning routine, no sense that her life exists to be consumed. Smith has clearly never been especially interested in that side of the bargain.
“I never wanted to be famous,” she says. “I’ve always been quite private. I just wanted to put music out as a teenager and see what happened. I feel really lucky that I’ve got such an amazing fanbase and people really show me love, but fame was never the goal.”
The tension, of course, is that success increasingly lives or dies by the algorithm. The defining British stars of recent years – PinkPantheress, Raye, Lola Young – have all been, in some part, forged in the fires of TikTok. Does Smith ever feel pressure to play that game? “Yeah definitely,” she says. “But, luckily, I’ve got a sick team, and we come up with ideas that we can do that are still me. I don’t want to be here doing trends – you’re not going to catch me doing TikTok dances or any of that stuff.”
Her inclination to privacy also stems from growing up under an unusually unforgiving spotlight. Smith first found an audience by uploading covers to YouTube, recorded from her bedroom in Walsall. Aged 15, she signed with a manager, and began making regular trips to London for songwriting sessions. After finishing her A-levels, she moved to the capital full-time, working shifts in a cafe while trying to carve out a career in music.
Blue Lights, which hauntingly paired Smith’s mellifluous voice with lyrics about police profiling and urban anxiety, landed on SoundCloud in 2016, instantly establishing her as one of the most compelling new voices in British music. The following year, Drake invited her on to his blockbuster playlist, More Life, exposing her to millions of listeners around the world.
Alongside the acclaim, though, came another kind of attention. Almost overnight, Smith became a symbol of a modern beauty ideal, often uncomfortably sexualised before she had properly entered adulthood. For years, the conversation around Jorja Smith the musician existed alongside another conversation entirely, one that Smith had no control over: that of Jorja Smith the face, Jorja Smith the body. “It’s not normal,” she says, reflecting on that time. “Growing up and having so many people having something to say about your appearance.”
The internet, as it tends to do, eventually turned. In the run-up to the release of Falling Or Flying in 2023, every online photo or video seemed to invite commentary on her weight. At one point, the phrase “Jorja Smith weight gain” trended on X for two days. It is something she brings up without prompting.
“It was difficult. I’d be reading things like: ‘What happened to her?’ Or, ‘She’s let herself go.’” She trails off. “It really knocks your confidence.”
On one occasion, she couldn’t resist replying. “Some blog page”– she waves away the name – “had put two photos side by side, like a before and after. I just commented: ‘What the hell, guys? I’m literally 18 in that picture. Why are you doing that?’” She shrugs. “People are so quick. They love you, then they hate you.”
What made that period particularly disorientating, she says, was that the public narrative bore almost no resemblance to reality; at the very moment strangers were dissecting her body online, she felt healthier than ever.
“I’d actually started eating properly,” she says. “Before that, I’d be so busy I’d skip meals, wake up late, I was running every day, obsessively. It was the first time I actually felt healthy, and then people wanted to criticise me? It was a proper headfuck because I was thinking: Wait … can I do anything right?”
For a while, she stopped wanting to do photoshoots, or even go outside for fear of being photographed. “I sort of went into myself,” she says. “I felt like no one could really understand what I was going through.” Her coping mechanisms, she says, are to go for a walk or to the gym, though she catches herself revealing how fragile that equilibrium can still be.
Sometimes she’ll still “see comments … and start thinking: Maybe they’re right?” She stops herself mid-thought. “Oh my God,” she says, laughing in disbelief. “Even me saying that now is crazy. Because they’re just random people!
“But I have my days,” she continues. “I was talking to my mum about it the other day, and she was like: ‘At least they’re not saying you sound shit!’”
One of the ways she’s protected herself is by stepping away from those online platforms. She no longer runs her own social media – her team posts on Instagram, and she only keeps the app to message artists and friends. She hasn’t been on X in years, and never goes looking for commentary about herself.
Part of that self-reclamation meant physically removing herself, too. In 2023, after years in London, she moved back to Walsall – an unusual move for an artist at the height of their career. “I just needed a reset,” she says. “I thought: Let me move back home, touch some grass, see some trees.” London, she says, had become tangled up with the pressures of her career. This City, one of the tracks on What Are the Odds, explores her love-hate relationship with the capital. “Anything negative that happened, I kind of put London as the culprit,” she says. “I was like: ‘I hate this place. I need to get out.’” Distance has since softened London’s hard edges, and today, she divides her time between the West Midlands and the capital: “I’m feeling the buzz of what this place has to offer again, instead of feeling as if I have to wear armour all the time.”
She is fiercely protective, too, of the place she comes from. In an industry so often centred on London, she is keen to keep reminding people that remarkable artists also emerge from elsewhere. “People forget I’m not from London,” she laughs. “And I’m not from Birmingham, either!” In September, Smith will return to Walsall for a home town show at Walsall Arena, a school turned community arts space she used to visit as a girl. Part of Spotify’s Hometown Billboard campaign, the bill doubles as a showcase of local talent: childhood friend Wesley Joseph, with whom she released the single July this year, supports, alongside the Blue Lights Choir she founded to create opportunities for young people in the town. “I hope it’s a moment that inspires the next generation to believe that big things really can come from Walsall,” she says.
These days, when she isn’t working, she is trying to build a life that exists beyond music. She walks, cooks and has rediscovered running. “I’ve signed up for the London marathon next year,” she says. “I wanted a goal, and I watched everyone finishing it this year and thought: That’s such a sick thing to do.”
Despite her instinct to retreat from the spotlight, Smith is also consciously trying to step back into the world. Recently, she was on the phone with a friend back home when she mentioned turning down an invitation to a Vogue party. Her friend wouldn’t let it slide. “She was like, ‘Go! Not everyone gets invited to these things. You only live once. If you keep turning everything down, you’re going to be 70 and have zero stories of fun nights out because you never went anywhere!’” she laughs.
Outside, the heat hasn’t lifted. Mourners are still in the beer garden. As she gets up to leave, Smith pulls a cap low over her face and slides on a pair of oversized sunglasses. Until that moment, it has been surprisingly easy to forget that she is famous at all.
“It’s all about finding that balance,” she says, smiling as she stands. “But I’m feeling good. I’m starting to feel like my younger self again.”
What Are the Odds is out now on FAMM. Jorja Smith performs at Walsall Arena on 6 September.
