Jorja Smith was once the heir to Amy Winehouse – but now she won’t let us in

Jorja Smith’s long-awaited second record keeps the listener at arm’s length

When Jorja Smith first emerged in 2016, with a remarkable voice and a worldliness that belied her 18 years, she seemed like the natural heir to Amy Winehouse.

What came next only seemed to confirm that: her 2018 debut album Lost & Found, two BRIT Awards, a Mercury Prize nomination, and collaborations with Drake, Stormzy and Kendrick Lamar.

But amid the acclaim, Smith found only anxiety. She retreated from the capital to the sanctuary of Walsall, where she grew up. Returning with Falling or Flying, her long-awaited second record, Smith is healed – but hardened.

“I can’t even say what’s in my head,” Smith admits, foregrounded by mellow, galactic synths and explosive percussion on the album’s title track. Old friends and production duo DAMEDAME* conjure an 1980s-indebted beat that challenges the drama of Smith’s voice – yet despite these two expressive forces, her lyrics are frustratingly vague.
Jorja Smith’s Falling or Flying is long-awaited (Photo: Ivor Alice)
The clarity of storytelling from her early career, once so compelling, is lost in thick clouds of self-protection. “I’ll be gone before you let me down,” she promises on lustrous R’n’B acoustic jam “Lately”. These songs are like carefully encrypted communions with old flames that we shouldn’t be privy to; Smith goes to great pains to spare us the details.

Her remarkable voice, however, swells with such emotion that her scant lyrical sketches can be mistaken for stories in brilliant Technicolor. “GO GO GO” flirts with the pop-punk zeitgeist with its punchy percussion; lead single “Little Things”, with its funky, hip-swaying rhythms, taps into the 26-year-old’s vivacity – the weight of the world on her shoulders melts away. “Feeling”, her duet with afro-swing titan J Hus, is another sensual triumph, but beneath it all is a reluctance to be vulnerable.

The most fascinating moments are when Smith reckons not with matters of the heart but the realities of her extraordinary life. On “Try and Fit In” she softly confesses to thoughts of quitting and the limitations of money influencing your happiness. It features the choir of teenage girls Smith started in her hometown, and even in the track’s brevity, it feels like the closest Falling or Flying will allow us to be to a changed artist.

Her final words on the record are the ones that linger: “You’ll never understand what’s on my mind and I know that it cuts deeper.”