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.
Falling or Flying, by contrast, focuses on inward-facing songs that ponder uneven relationships and personal growth: Walsall Smith, perhaps, rather than London fashion week Smith; more Solange than, say, Rihanna. This capacity of Smith’s to have feet in both camps means tonight’s launch gig for Falling or Flying can take place in central London’s shiniest new 1,500-capacity venue, but happens under the aegis of Rough Trade record shops. Tonight’s show is, essentially, a glorified in-store appearance – one with a full band, three backing vocalists and two percussionists instead of a microphone and a keyboard player rammed in between the record racks. Attenders receive the album on vinyl; more low-key shows follow in Bristol and Nottingham before her tour proper in November.
One of the best things about Falling or Flying is the way the album’s inventive percussion interacts with Smith’s assured vocal, where inhaled R&B frequently meets singsong dancehall and mumbled jazzy intonations – a very British vernacular. (Smith actually drew some criticism from the primetime TV audience for allegedly being too hard to understand when she performed on Strictly Come Dancing last week.)
Tonight’s Falling or Flying-themed set opens with a wallop from the drums – a meaty intro that grows more polyrhythmic, with a percussionist joining the drummer at the front of the mix. Opening track Try Me finds Smith in no-nonsense mode, singing about how she feels now, as pistols cock and boxing-ring bells ding around her and the backing vocalists double down on one word: “Change, change, change”. The song is, in part, about online criticism (“Nothing is ever enough,” Smith sing-sighs) and her voice holds in it a fierce kind of sadness.
Hot on its heels is another new album track, She Feels, where some three-legged trip-hop foregrounds Smith’s narrow-eyed assessments of a relationship. “I’m tired of all the fake shit,” she sings. Next up are live Afrobeats, and Smith’s molten duet with rapper J Hus, Feelings, who sadly isn’t here to do his very entertaining parts.
The beat variegations keep coming. Broken Is the Man channels a little old-timey near-doowop – a key track on the record in which Smith rues the day she loved a man who made hay of her flaws. “I was never broken,” declares Smith, her voice like a pregnant raincloud, implying the torrents it could unleash, but doesn’t. Although Smith’s voice expands with yearning tonight, her instinct right now is to undersing; to imply rather than overstate. All this coupled with a floor-skimming black dress adds up to what feels like a Serious Artistic Statement.
Not every new outing is mesmerising, however. A few of the new songs fail to hold the attention in the same way, with less variety in their downbeat tendency. Rhythm comes to the rescue once again, though. Hearing a live band play Little Things – which channels early 00s UK funky house via what might be samba – is a highlight of the night. Smith closes with On My Mind, her 2017 hook-up with the producer Preditah, an out-and-out UK garage zinger. It’s a relief to hear that homebody Jorja Smith – persuasive as she is – isn’t quite finished with her the version of herself that wants to dance.
