‘I don’t even know how to be me quite yet’: Jorja Smith on self-doubt, body positivity and her stunning second album

Jorja Smith was done with London. It was early 2021, about five years since the singer had left her home in Walsall at 18 to try to make it big in music. She hadn’t done badly: two Brit awards and Mercury prize and Grammy nominations followed her atmospheric 2018 debut album Lost & Found. But she was not all that happy. “I got really overwhelmed in London,” she says. “I realised it was the smallest thing: not being able to see the sky. Back home, bro, there’s trees everywhere, whereas here I felt trapped.”

She moved back to Walsall, where she is renting a cottage while waiting for builders to finish doing up a 400year-old farmhouse she bought in 2019. With all due respect to the West Midlands market town, it is not where you tend to find young pop-R&B stars, let alone one with 3.7 million Instagram followers who has worked with Drake, Stormzy, FKA twigs, Burna Boy and Kendrick Lamar and walked in more than one fashion show. She now tends to split herself in two: there is Jorja, the performer (she uses air quotes the first time she speaks about herself like this, pastel talons swooping), and Jorja, the girl born down a quiet road of red-brick terraced houses.

She banished any second-album jitters by making the bulk of the forthcoming Falling or Flying with Walsall production duo DameDame*, both (anonymous) women, one of whom she has known since she was 15. She seems content. She is warm, quick to laugh and speaks in rapid sentences, jolting from one line of thought to the next before returning to her original point, sometimes by interrupting herself to ask: “What was I saying?” There are admissions of doubt and insecurity, but her unfiltered fizzy energy suggests a woman comfortable in who she is becoming: a person, she says, of extremes.

When we meet, she is early, sitting in her car outside a photo studio on a north London industrial estate and leaning over to smile at me from behind the wheel. She is here for this interview and then a shoot for a German magazine. It is a nerve-racking time when an artist sets out to heavily promote an album months before anyone can hear it, part of which involves playing the social media game.

When we last spoke, in 2017, she said she would post on Instagram, then close it without endlessly scrolling. What does she make of social media now? “I hate it,” she says – apart from TikTok, which is “a nice place. But Instagram … Someone else is doing my Instagram,” she says, now cross-legged on a sofa in a secondhand Nike T-shirt. “Sometimes, I’ll wish I gave myself a