Jorja Smith - Lost & Found

Pitchfork 81

The precocious 20-year-old singer fuses R&B, soul, and trip-hop on a debut album that documents her ongoing quest to discover who she is and how she fits into a troubled world.

The Guardian 80

(Famm)

In 2016, Walsall teenager Jorja Smith emerged with Blue Lights, a Dizzee Rascal-sampling lullaby narrating black British youth’s fear of the police. This impressive debut led to co-signs from Drake, Stormzy, and Kendrick Lamar, not to mention the 2018 Brits critics’ choice award. The 20-year-old’s first album finds her standing on her own two feet. A gentle record of lithe, accomplished slow jams, it toys with a myriad of genres: while delicate R&B is the most obvious reference, there’s a UK dance nod too – not in the literal way of On My Mind, her 2017 garage collaboration with Preditah, but that distinctly polished percussive sound is evident throughout, in the slinkiness of February 3rd and the humid undercurrent of The One.

The social commentary is limited to Blue Lights and the soft rap of freestyle Lifeboats (“Why do we watch them drown / We’re too selfish in the lifeboats”), but the album’s appeal lies especially in Smith’s silken accounts of despondent romances – soaring, hopeless ballads about adolescent crushes. Ebbing and flowing with daydreams and a glossy but gritty pulse, Lost & Found is quietly, confidently remarkable.

The Guardian 60

(The Orchard)

Most people will know Jorja Smith either by voice, thanks to her sunny R&B vocals on Drake’s Get It Together, or by face, thanks to her many magazine covers, five-storey high billboard campaigns and fashion brand endorsements. Others in the music industry will know her as Bruno Mars’s tour support, and Kendrick Lamar’s co-writer on I Am from the Black Panther soundtrack. After a clutch of singles and a Brits critics’ choice award, this pop-R&B debut album is her proper introduction as a solo artist, working it all out in real time as we listen in.

The highlights include Wandering Romance, where, between bass stabs, she wholly exposes her desire and frustration. You can almost see her face writhe as she belts: “No one keeps me dirty like you do … so take it how you want it, take all my love.” The effect is rousing, to say the least.

The delicate yearning on February 3rd hears her begging someone to “lose themselves from playing games”, conjuring those raw moments of trying to make a lover commit. On Lifeboats (Freestyle) she ponders “so why are the richest in floats and all my brothers drowning?” over gentle piano lines and soft hums – she channels Estelle’s cockney conversation, but without quite matching her finesse. The album can sound laboured, and not just lyrically. You can feel her voice strain and contort even in the first few notes of the opening track, where she walks on the edge of the overly saccharine, only to eventually crash to a fall with Tomorrow (“Don’t you wonder why / I won’t say goodbye / I won’t even cry.”)

Lost & Found is a well-paced album full of gentle vocals, catchy pop hooks and a playful relationship with the pains of youth, love and insecurity. Smith’s voice moves between arrestingly husky and overly nasal, with plenty of room to develop, but the sparse and uninspiring production doesn’t save the songs from feeling forgettable at times. As far as the poetry of trying, failing and picking yourself up again goes, this has merit, but as for staking a claim as pop’s biggest new R&B talent, it doesn’t quite stand five stories tall.