In 2017, an up-and-coming Jorja Smith shaved her head and deleted much of the content from her Instagram account. At the beginning of 2023, Smith – by now a major international star, with Brits, a Grammy nomination and a slew of A-list collaborations under her belt – abruptly left London and moved back to her native Walsall. She started a choir for local girls and bedded in with all-female production duo DameDame* to finish her second album, Falling or Flying.
Most artists draw a line under their previous work from time to time, staging that most predictable of events – a reinvention. But it seems to be within Smith’s modus operandi to come forward and retreat, switch between registers; to reassess. At 16 tracks, Falling or Flying, released last week, gives the soulful R&B singer’s more extroverted side a certain amount of airtime – not least in the form of its breakout hit Little Things, a knockout tune about leaving the party with someone whose attention to detail matches your own. This may only be Smith’s second studio LP, but in between the 2018 release of her debut – Lost And Found – and now, Smith has also put out an entire mini-album’s worth of one-off bangers with the likes of Burna Boy and Popcaan. (A placeholding EP, amusingly called Be Right Back, also came out in 2021.) You could say mid-period Smith became more about the good times than the pensive young woman who penned Blue Lights, an early single about running away from police.
