Jorja Smith Put Herself First and the Rest Fell Into Place (2024)

JORJA SMITH ISN’T ONE to blindly follow her intuition. Sure, her gut has led her to some very good decisions, like the one she made in 2015 to move to London and pursue a career in music shortly after graduating high school. Within just a few years, the British singer and songwriter had star-making guest appearances with Drake and Kendrick Lamar, a coveted spot on the short list for the Mercury Prize, and a Best New Artist nomination at the 2019 Grammy Awards, next to acts like Dua Lipa and Luke Combs. Everything was lining up for her as one of the fastest-rising artists in R&B and pop.

Still, she says, she doubted herself, especially as she began to feel lonely in her new life. “When I put out my first album and then I went on tour, I was never around,” Smith, 26, recalls. “I wasn’t around family much, I wasn’t really around my friends much.” She longed for the familiar faces and places of Walsall, England, where she’d grown up. Back in London, Smith would often ask herself: “Why the hell am I here?”

For six years, she pushed that voice away — until 2021, when she finally listened to her gut, headed home to Walsall, and began working on her long-awaited second album, Falling or Flying, out Sept. 29. It’s an album that sees her taking a confident leap from a promising new artist to one who’s in full command of her sound. “Really, I should just go off how I feel, because my gut feeling is actually always correct and I’ll just be ignoring it,” she says. “At the end of it, who does it all come down to? Me. And if I’m not happy, then what happens?”

Once she moved back to Walsall, the album began taking shape as Smith reconnected with the production duo DAMEDAME*, one of whose members she has known since she was 15 years old. In them, Smith found a new, intuitive way of tapping into joys that slipped away from her, like her love for playing piano. “There’s so many things I stopped doing because I lived in the city,” Smith says. “They really got me back into doing what I used to do.” Suddenly, the singer wasn’t booking studio time and crossing her fingers that something would emerge from a writing session. Most of the time, she says, the three of them were just chopping it up and cracking jokes over food.

She praises DAMEDAME*’s authentic quality: “I feel like they have that naiveté and they have much more of that inner child on the outside,” Smith says. She compares that with the music industry in London, “where there’s loads of opinions and what people think — they’re not there. They don’t have that other noise. Everything’s just pure.”

Smith says she’d never made a project like Falling or Flying before, one where she felt no pressure to do anything but be there in the moment. Her 2018 debut, Lost & Found, was essentially a compilation of songs she had written over the course of several years; Be Right Back, the EP she shared in 2021 to hold fans over while she worked on the new album, was made up of songs from the two years prior.

This time, Smith realized that if she wanted her music to reflect her current state of being, she couldn’t dig through old files and find a portal into the future — she had to start from scratch. “I’ve stepped into being a woman in the making of it,” she says. “Loads of songs are talking about other things, and then I’ll sing them in the mirror and I’m like, ‘Oh, this is about me.’”

On the upbeat, U.K.-garage-infused “Little Things,” Smith sings about the rush of a new infatuation; on “Feelings,” she shows off an easy chemistry with the British rapper and singer J Hus. But the album’s emotional core comes through even more on songs like the brief, heartfelt ballad “Try and Fit In,” where she advises someone who’s going through burnout, or the acoustic-guitar-backed “Too Many Times,” where she addresses the need to break unhealthy cycles in relationships. “Some of them I couldn’t write because I hadn’t been through what I needed to write about until last year,” Smith says.

Smith valued her new collaborative partners’ ability to keep her honest as they worked on this album. “J, I think you need to rewrite this one,” she remembers DAMEDAME* telling her about one song. “I was like, ‘Well, yeah, I do, because I was actually lying.’ I needed to rewrite it because what I was writing about, I didn’t want someone to hear. So I wrote a completely different song. And then as time passed, I was like, ‘f*ck it. I’ll write what I mean to say.’”

She also credits some of her creative breakthrough on this album to the three years she has spent consistently attending therapy. “I’ve just been able to look at myself differently,” she says. “That’s helped me let go. Honestly, I used to dwell on things or get obsessed with things in my head.”

She says her newfound self-knowledge has helped her take more authority over her life and the choices she makes. “What I’ve noticed in the past, let’s say I’ve said yes to certain things — whether it’s a performance or something recorded. In my mind and heart, while I’m saying yes, I’m thinking, ‘No, no, no. I know I shouldn’t do this.’ Then I do it, and all the things I felt when I wanted to say no I still feel.” She doesn’t get into specifics on those past choices, but it’s clear that between therapy and collaborating with people who understand her deeply, Smith has shifted her entire worldview so her own feelings take the lead.

Whereas she might have been haunted in the past by what she should have said in an argument or how she should have stood up for herself, Smith now feels free to follow her musical inspiration. “Being in the studio making songs is the best place in the world,” she says. “What people have to say about what I look like and that stuff — that doesn’t affect the music. It just affects me, which is sh*t, but I’ll get on with it.”

When she’s in Walsall, Smith feels untouchable. But she’s also learning that her home is wherever she feels most at peace. “Home is just with people that make you feel like yourself. That’s when I feel at home,” she says, adding with a laugh: “So it can be in London, but I don’t want to say that because I don’t like London.”

The headlining tour she’s planning in support of Falling or Flying will take her out of her sanctuary, but she now knows she can bring that comfort with her. “That is my other safety bubble, because my crew and band, we’re family,” Smith adds. “That’s like my other home. I feel like I’ll just take all my energy that I’m storing here on the road. I always come back here.”