Amid the smoky, soulful and tender ruminations of Jorja Smith's second album, falling or flying, there is a curious little outlier, like a bejeweled brooch rattling around a dresser drawer. "Little Things" is a funky-house cut that treats a club dalliance as equally transient and essential: "Just a little thing for you and I," the chorus offers, "and if it's meant to be, then that's all right." Of the 2023 LP's four singles, the song is the least like anything in the singer's body of work, which has largely been anchored in a familiar U.K. pop-R&B, including her Mercury Prize-nominated 2018 debut, the subdued and spellbound Lost & Found. And yet, the mode came so naturally to her that it cracked a doorway to an alternate musical world beyond the one she inhabited.
Of course, Smith found an early career lifeline on the dance floor in 2017 — as a guest on Drake's More Life song "Get It Together" with the Afro-house trailblazer Black Coffee, and in collaboration with Birmingham DJ Preditah for the U.K. garage track "On My Mind." Those songs were quite far off from the sound she was developing on her own, one more preoccupied with the mind than the body — yet traces of dancehall and house lingered, even as she more conspicuously channeled Amy Winehouse.
"Little Things," then, proposed a worthwhile thought experiment: If R&B and dance are the competing propulsionary forces of Smith's career, where might diverting the tracks in the latter direction lead? No need to wonder any longer: The answer is What Are the Odds, Smith's third album, which recruits "Little Things" co-producer P2J for a full-on night out, 38 minutes of rush-the-floor jams culled from across genres. Initially imagined as an EP, the music broke containment to form the basis of a reintroduction — and in taking the gamble and embracing a new way of being, Smith has never sounded more herself.
What Are the Odds was born of a simple conceit: for Smith to enjoy her own music in the spaces where she feels most comfortable. "I like going out to listen to music, a lot of my friends are DJs. It'd be nice to hear more of my stuff when I'm outside," Smith told The Guardian. True to the cause, the album is "her stuff" — the quiet musings of a dignified yet wounded soul — smuggled into the open. There are songs about losing a friend and watching someone succumb to addiction, yet they are stimulating, if poignantly so. Even the throbbing "Dancing," which begins in the suggestive mode of "Little Things," gradually reveals the tortured spirit that possesses many of her older songs. "I don't wanna know what's right, I don't care what they say / Somеthing about you, I couldn't replace / Said it was ovеr, over for now / Until we'd have one last dance again," Smith sings before losing herself and burying these realizations in a la-la-la-la chorus, spinning around and dancing like it's the last time.
Perhaps she picked up some tricks working with the emotional junglist Nia Archives, a fellow Briton who has mastered uptempo/downbeat as a balancing act. Nia's remix of "Little Things" put an even greater emphasis on groove and the complementary dynamics of jacked-up rhythms and Smith's luscious vocals, and their more recent collaboration, "Get Me Down," is a blueprint for the exercises undertaken by this album, its mix of jungle and trip-hop brisk, atmospheric and a bit melancholy, moored by a topsy-turvy turn of phrase: "I like how you get me down / Call me when you're coming 'round." But Smith's own previous outings can't be dismissed here. It may be an obvious departure from the sound for which she is known, but the beating heart of What Are the Odds is the one she's always worn on her sleeve.
For that reason, this album isn't so much a reinvention as a reformation. Its songs are more interested in spiritually retaining the Jorja Smith pathos than guiding you into a new space, settling into the updated soundbed without breaking a sweat. "I Lied, You Lied," a skipping, jazzy number that marries the piano ballads of her past with the club joints of her present, perfectly illustrates the care with which she's managed this transition: It's a breakup song about a partner's resistance to letting her return to single life, and by extension, the club scene. While the music ushers you toward that very setting, the lyrics, in typical Smith fashion, play out like an emotional tug-of-war.
That tension is what grounds these songs even as they keep humming along. As "Young Heart" fiddles with Afro-dance elements, Smith pens a note to her younger self: "Love me, hold me / You're all I know." It feels as if she is merely translating her noticings into a new language. Doing so requires immersion, and she commits by pulling from grime ("What Are the Odds"), U.K. garage ("This City"), Afrobeats ("Alive"), jungle ("The Way It Was"), deep house ("Make It Your Home") and beyond, spanning the sounds of English nightlife.
The 2020s have been rife with considerations of the U.K.'s Black diaspora — from J Hus' Big Conspiracy to FKA twigs' CAPRISONGS to Jim Legxacy's black british music (2025) — and it isn't a coincidence that dance music is at the center of the story. Through various migratory efforts and cultural exchanges, the sounds that reverberate through the clubs of West Africa, Jamaica and England have slowly cross-pollinated. Before Smith made him her co-pilot, P2J had already been a key figure in creating this synergy. A British Nigerian from London, he stoked the flames of Burna Boy's Afro-fusionist vision, and helped plant the Afropop seed internationally with GoldLink's Diaspora and Beyoncé's Lion King soundtrack, The Gift. Before that, he was making beats for road rappers Krept & Konan and grime fixtures like Stormzy. Most notably, he is the primary producer for Wizkid, bringing forth the breakthrough single "Essence" with Tems, which finally burst the stateside dam and brought Afropop to the American charts. Few artists have a closer bead on the point that connects these histories into a branching lineage.
Together, Smith and P2J take the imagined club diaspora a step further, not simply integrating sounds but imbuing them with Smith's distinctive laid-back energy. This isn't just the dance floor as Jorja Smith envisions it; it is her whole vibe interpreted in a more liberated context. Whether singing of choosers or takers (as she once put it on Lost & Found's "The One"), the high life's drawbacks or life-affirming sex, London's false promise of home or one's power to make their own home with their chosen person, What Are the Odds is as outwardly vibrant and openhearted as it is inwardly so. It brings a much-needed reminder that R&B and dance can possess the same soul.
Copyright 2026 NPR
