Jorja Smith was done with London. It was early 2021, about five years since the singer had left her home in Walsall at 18 to try to make it big in music. She hadn’t done badly: two Brit awards and Mercury prize and Grammy nominations followed her atmospheric 2018 debut album Lost & Found. But she was not all that happy. “I got really overwhelmed in London,” she says. “I realised it was the smallest thing: not being able to see the sky. Back home, bro, there’s trees everywhere, whereas here I felt trapped.” She moved back to Walsall, where...