Ten Years After 'Blue Lights,' Jorja Smith Sounds Like Herself Again

Jorja Smith is gearing up to release her third album, What Are the Odds?, made entirely with London producer P2J (Richard Isong, a longtime Beyoncé collaborator). It marks a shift toward club-leaning British and African sounds — funky house, garage, drum'n'bass, Afrobeats — that grew out of a single track on her 2023 record, Falling or Flying.

The album came together fast. After roughly two years of trading reference sounds and ideas with P2J, one September studio session turned into an entire record: he had quietly built a stash of beats shaped around their conversations, and Smith cut vocals for five songs in a single day, then freestyled four more the next. Within days she was in her label's office telling them the album already existed.

The title nods to where she'd been before that session. During the rollout for Falling or Flying, Smith hit a low point, worn down in part by relentless commentary about her body that followed her online. She never stopped performing, but pulled back from social media and, by her own account, had to relearn how to enjoy making music at all.

The comeback arrived alongside an unsettling detour: last autumn, a track released under the name Haven, called “I Run,” spread across TikTok with vocals that sounded exactly like hers. Fans assumed it was an unreleased Jorja Smith song. Her label had it taken down after determining the vocals were AI-generated from a model trained on her voice, an experience she has described as a jarring preview of what AI could mean for working musicians.

A decade on from “Blue Lights,” the Dizzee Rascal-sampling single that launched her career at 18, Smith says she's spending less energy looking backward. These days, she's more focused on staying close to whatever made her want to make music in the first place.