Within a week of uploading her debut single to SoundCloud, Jorja Smith went viral. It was January 2016. She was 18, unsigned and had been working in Starbucks since moving to London from Walsall, in the West Midlands, six months before. There was no big label push, no video, no PR campaign. But still, “Blue Lights” blew up, with shoutouts from Skrillex and Stormzy catapulting Smith towards half a million streams and into the sights of every A&R in the country.
Smith’s mellifluous voice marked her out as a rare talent, but even more exemplary was the songwriting. Sampling Dizzee Rascal’s “Sirens”, Smith was inspired to write the song while working on an A-level essay: “Is Postcolonialism Still Present In Grime Music?” The result is a scathing study of the police prejudice she’d seen her young black male friends face, with Smith repeatedly reassuring the listener that “There’s no need to run if you’ve done nothing wrong.” Her timing was bang on. Six months later the track would be played at a Black Lives Matter rally in Birmingham after the movement picked up wind in Britain.
The 21-year-old’s big break came, however, when Drake played “Blue Lights” on his OVO Sound Radio. Now on the rapper’s radar, Smith received a message from Drake in the summer of 2016 requesting a collaboration: a dream for any emerging artist. She said no. “It was a really sick song,” she says now, “but I wasn’t feeling it.” Almost a year later, after a breakup made her see the song anew, she changed her mind. Despite being “a bit offended by it at first, because he thought, ‘Maybe she doesn’t want to work with me,’” Drake gave Smith not one, but two features on his multi-record-setting 2017 mixtape More Life.
Smith has a talent for drawing music’s most revered titans to her. She was recently invited to play at Quincy Jones’ 85th birthday celebrations at the Montreux Jazz Festival, while Kendrick Lamar offered her a slot on his much-hyped Black Panther: The Album earlier this year.
All this, plus Smith became the first unsigned artist to win the Critics’ Choice Award at the 2018 Brit Awards, released the most talked-about debut album this side of the Atlantic (Lost & Found charted at No3 in June and was nominated for the Mercury Prize in July) and is now GQ’s Vero Breakthrough Solo Artist Of The Year.
“It’s mad,” she says of the award, “but I’m very happy to be recognised for what I’m doing.” Smith’s sound incorporates left-field soul, jazz, R&B and hip hop, with the odd powerhouse ballad thrown in for good measure. Think Amy Winehouse meets Lauryn Hill. Where “Blue Lights” samples Dizzee Rascal, the classically trained singer has also borrowed from the likes of Henry Purcell.
Smith is still purposefully unsigned. “I don’t know any different,” she says, “and it’s been going very well.” Would she take a major deal? “Not right now,” she says. “I like having as much control as I can. It’s my life, so I need to be doing what I want and making what I love without someone else dictating to me.”
This desire to do things her own way is tempered by a cautiousness rarely seen in today’s young female stars. The pouting selfies Smith shares to her 1.3 million Instagram followers might suggest that she’s brimming with stage-school bravado, but in person Smith is softly spoken and shy. While she loves performing, she hates “people hearing my talking voice”. And despite levels of hype that would be enough to inflate even the most modest of egos, for Smith, this year has been something of a pleasant surprise: “I didn’t have any expectations for the album, because I didn’t want to be disappointed.”
When asked what has been her made-it moment of 2018 – this glorious, golden year in her career – Smith replies, “I don’t think I’ve had it yet, no. I’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
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Jorja Smith and Vero donate $50,000 to change more lives through music
