Jorja Smith is back!
After a relatively quiet 2022 (we stress ‘relatively’ because we did get collaborations with Ibeyi and Joy Orbison, and a couple of remixes), the Walsall-born singer is back with a brand new single, “Try Me”, and she’s brought some elaborate new visuals to go with it.
Directed by Amber Grace Johnson and shot around the suburbs of Marseille, France, the new video opens with a dramatic shot of Jorja crawling on her hands and knees through a dark space before we move to the stunning Roman amphitheatre in Arles, another town in southern France.
In a lot of ways, it’s a song of two halves, opening with a driving, percussive section that feels commanding and decisive before giving way to a much more delicate, cello-driven section before abruptly ending altogether. That duality reflects the changes she’s seen in herself in the years since Lost & Found brought her so much success; those intervening years, she explains, have made her feel both hugely successful and also at the mercy of something totally out of her control.
“I like this world that I’ve just come into,” she said in a statement released alongside the song, “and I’m still figuring things out. Always figuring things out. This is the first time I’m putting stuff out there that I can connect with right now.”
What the year ahead holds for Jorja remains to be seen, but later in the same statement, she writes: “Be Right Back did exactly what I wanted it to do. It was a little waiting room so people knew I was coming back.” So make of that what you will.
Peep the visuals for “Try Me” above and be sure to add the song to your playlists.
