Jorja Smith ‘What Are The Odds’ review: A declaration of complete freedom
In dancing through the discomfort, Smith has delivered her best album yet.
The opening moments of an album often signal its intentions at large, introducing the world and energy of the project. Even so, it feels particularly deliberate when ‘For Life’, the first track from Jorja Smith’s third album, What Are the Odds, opens with drums that are sharp, crisp and determined to make you move. Smith agrees, declaring that she wants the new record to “get the world skanking!”
Though her career began with well-meaning and not entirely inaccurate comparisons to Amy Winehouse, Smith has always been best when letting loose and prioritising fun and energy in her music. Her last album, 2023’s Falling or Flying, was made after returning from London to the cocoon of her native Walsall after a spate of vile body-shaming comments online (“I tried to not take offence but I read everything,” she sings here). While parts of that album clung to the balladry she’d become known for, its most compelling moments, most notably ecstatic lead single ‘Little Things’, headed for the dancefloor with an intoxicating sense of liberation.
That sense of freedom is all over What Are the Odds., Smith’s best album yet. Working exclusively with producer P2J (Stormzy, Beyoncé, Burna Boy), it sees her dip into UKG, funky, house, 2-step and more with gleeful abandon. “I don’t want to skank to a ballad,” she says of the album, stopping short of disowning her older material but certainly embracing a new beginning. When she reflects on the disillusionment of fame and the music industry on the album’s title track, the drums and bass that back her up are propulsive and danceable; even when getting deep, her method is to dance through the discomfort.
Suitably, the feeling is then well and truly shaken off on the following track, ‘What’s Done is Done’, a giddy dancefloor delight. “You were still hoping that I’d stay the same,” she winks, maybe to a lover, but also an applicable message to those trying to box her music in.
The phrase “what are the odds” would usually come with a question mark. Here, it’s deliberately left off, instead reading as a statement and a declaration of complete freedom.