Jorja Smith has put out What Are the Odds, and the record does the thing her catalogue has been circling for years: it commits to the dance floor. NPR's Sheldon Pearce reviewed the album on August 27 and read it as a reintroduction rather than a reinvention, which is a distinction the songs earn.
The seed was a single track. Little Things, a funky-house cut buried among the smokier material on 2023's falling or flying, sounded nothing like the rest of that album and came to her more easily than anything around it. P2J co-produced it, and he is back for the whole of What Are the Odds, 38 minutes of floor-facing material that began as an EP idea before it outgrew the format.
Smith has been in these rooms before without building a record in them. In 2017 she guested on Drake's Get It Together alongside the Afro-house producer Black Coffee, and she cut the UK garage track On My Mind with the Birmingham DJ Preditah. Her own writing went the other way, toward the interior pop-R&B of the Mercury-nominated Lost & Found in 2018.
Her stated reason for the change is unfussy. "I like going out to listen to music, a lot of my friends are DJs," she told The Guardian, adding that hearing her own songs in those rooms would be a fair ambition.
The album keeps the emotional weather she is known for and moves it somewhere brighter. Dancing opens in the flirtatious register of Little Things and turns anguished before it ends. I Lied, You Lied welds a jazzy piano ballad to a club rhythm and reads as a breakup song about a partner who will not let her go back out. There are songs about losing a friend and about watching somebody fall into addiction. Her work with the junglist Nia Archives, including Get Me Down, is the closest blueprint for how the balance is struck.
We covered I Lied, You Lied when it arrived ahead of the album, and Smith's summer already pointed this way when she closed Sziget alongside Skrillex. Release dates sit in the release calendar, with more from the rnb-soul hub.
The facts
- What Are the Odds is Jorja Smith's third album and runs 38 minutes
- P2J co-produced it after working on the 2023 song Little Things
- The project started as an EP before it grew into an album
- Her 2018 debut Lost & Found was nominated for the Mercury Prize
- She sang on Drake's Get It Together with Black Coffee in 2017
How this checks out
Single source
Reported by a single outlet
Only one outlet has reported it so far, so it stays a single source.
Cited sources 1
Every outlet that reported this, linked to what it published. Equal credits, in alphabetical order.