On the Rise
Nia Smith

“Every line was pretty much a joke,” says Smith of her reggae-imbued second single. “It was about getting rid of that bad energy; we don’t have to be besties – we can be civil. Sometimes people make it seem like you have to be friends with everyone, but I don’t think it’s personal if you’re not my sort of person.”

Sometimes, there is a need to simply get a job done and, despite her young 20-years-of-age, Smith is not about time wasting. The Brixton native recalls times where she has walked into a studio to take care of business and been frustrated by the vibe.

“With the music industry, sometimes it feels like high school – there’s this clique over here, a clique over there” Smith adds. “Authenticity is really big to me; if it’s not that, I really struggle in situations. But I’ve made some really good friends in music.”

So far, these ‘good friends in music’ have certainly been of the covetable kind, most recently with dancehall icon Popcaan signing up to appear on the remix of “Personal”, which drops today. When Smith got the call, she couldn’t believe it. “My party song is ‘Clarks’, so he was on my main list of people I wanted.” Smith was adamant that, if it wasn’t an artist from her list, she didn’t want to release a remix – though she needn’t have worried about the end result. “It came back and it [was] great – he is great. I feel like it added some more grit. I met him at Unruly Fest [held for the first time in London this July] and he’s just a vibe.”

Both “Personal” and Smith’s upcoming debut EP, were produced by Grammy-winner and Sam Smith collaborator Jimmy Napes – an artist who Smith admired in her younger years. All of her musical connections have “naturally come about”: she has been working with producer Dom Valentino “out of his bedroom” since she was “16 and he was 23”; likewise Ed Thomas, who has co-written for artists including Jayda G, Amaarae and Nia Archives.

As such, Smith was keen to see if her dream trio could work together to manifest a sound that encapsulated her smorgasbord of influences – from Lauryn Hill, Little Simz and Amy Winehouse to Chronixx and Bob Marley. “I feel like they all really appreciate reggae – not as much as me! – and R&B and soul and pop, and all those worlds infused into one. It was a perfect collision,” she says. “I got what I wanted from that.”

Smith’s passion for music has been a lifelong endeavour spurred by a family of music lovers. Her grandfather possesses what she describes as a “crazy” music collection, something her father emulated digitally with the iPod she would steal to sing along to “all the great voices” such as Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Tina Turner, James Brown, Michael Jackson. Her uncle is a producer, while Romeo from So Solid Crew is her father’s cousin. The first CD Smith’s mother bought for her was Rihanna’s single, ‘Rude Boy’, something she considers as making sense in hindsight, given she was accustomed to “waking up to dub bass from reggae shaking my room like crazy.”

Aged 14, Smith began to teach herself guitar but struggled to play other people’s songs – or perform at all. Instead, she found a canny workaround: “I was like, if I make my own songs, then no one’s gonna know how bad I’m playing it – because they don’t know the song. I found singing songs to people always scary,” she explains. “I would play the songs to my parents and then run back upstairs. I remember writing a song about my mum asking me to do dishes and I didn’t want to. It sounded like a heartbreak song – it was so dumb.”

A stint at the BRIT school studying musical theatre and, later, East London Arts & Music studying music instilled Smith with “hustle and drive”, a conviction to make things happen for herself; it was not long before she began booking any gig she could find. A southbank music festival? Sure. Lambeth Country Show at Brockwell Park? Smith was there – even if no one was in the audience. She found it gave her a buzz “just to live a little – all of that was so quick.”

Cutting her chops on stage proved the perfect baptism of fire. The time since has seen Smith bag many sought after support slots, opening for Mahalia and Afrobeats star Tems, duetting with her teen favourite Pip Millett, and – most recently – even being hand-picked by SZA for her performance at the mammoth BST concert series at Hyde Park. A viral moment on TikTok, when she posted a cover of Adele’s “Set Fire To The Rain” just after the COVID-19 lockdown, proved “a happy accident” that set the wheels of her career into motion.

“I posted it and then – boom, it just went off. I never thought it could be my TikTok that did that. Bruno Mars reposted it the other day.” Watching the numbers grow felt very surreal, in part because of the distance created between an artist and their audience by social media. While different platforms increase reach insurmountably, they paradoxically make tangible community feelmuch less real. “If all those people that liked and commented were in the room with me, I’d feel it. But because it’s all online it’s hard to really understand how many people that is.’

Community is vital to Smith, an aspect of her growing whirlwind that brings her back to herself. This evening, for example, she is going bowling with friends – an opportunity to reclaim some time for herself after a busy day shooting and being grilled for this feature. Her friends make an appearance in the video for “Personal” because Smith feels “like it’s hard to create that sort of vibe with strangers.”

The acceleration of her momentum is documented between music videos: her debut, “Give Up The Fear” has Smith cycling through the night in black and white; meanwhile, “Personal” sees her level up, cruising around in a vintage convertible during the London summertime. Being in motion helps take the self-conscious pressure away, especially when it comes to expressing herself (“It’s going to be on YouTube forever”, after all) and it is clear that Smith finds it as hard to be static as she finds it necessary to cultivate the need to plough forwards in her career.

The sentiment anchors “Give Up The Fear”, a debut at striking odds with its follow-up single, “Personal”. A vulnerable piece of vintage R&B tinged with soul, the track’s brushed drums and lamentable keys give room for Smith’s incomparable bassy vocal to breathe. “The pain won’t stop until you give it up. Your heart is blocked until you give it up,” she intones. “I don’t wanna live like that.” For a first outing it is remarkably ruminatory, and Smith saw it more as an artistic statement than a play at the numbers game.

“It was the best introduction because of what it was about – giving up fear, letting go, and just creating the stuff you want to create,” she explains. “It was all about my high standards, overthinking everything I was making. I’m a crazy overthinker.” Smith recalls watching her ten-year-old brother create books and drawings for the fun of it and doing the same at his age. Now, with social media, the temptation to compare is always there, and fearless creativity becomes lost as the years tick by. “I had all this weight on my shoulders about how to write a song, which I’ve been doing all this time; why am I now thinking about it so deeply? It was about the pain of that, and letting it go.”

For all her bravado, Smith is not without a thread of self-doubt,and despite such achievements this propensity for perfectionist tendencies and high expectations of self meant her confidence ebbed and flowed. She had ideas of being a “teenage popstar” in part due to the success of artists like Billie Eilish, thinking “if I’m not a teenager when I’m doing this, I’ve failed; now, she realises “it’s really not that deep. When I turned 20, I was like ‘my teenage popstar dream is over’ – but it hadn’t even started yet. As long as I’m making music, I’m happy.”

However, such dreams were abruptly thrown into trepidation when Smith lost her voice last November. Two months later, it still hadn’t returned, and a consultation quickly informed her she was in need of surgery. It was a scary reinforcement that the gifts that let her pursue lofty dreams carried the risk of being finite. “My single [was] supposed to drop in a couple of weeks. I’d just moved out, so was living alone. All this change is happening. I learned some lessons from it.

“At the end of the day, we’re not built to sing,” Smith continues. “If I want to still sing when I’m 30, I’ve got to look after it now.” Back then she says she would “YOLO life – go out, scream, have fun with my friends;” now, she warms up and cools down, a drink and a late night is rare, as well as oily food. “Life’s more boring now ‘cause I think about everything; it’s just a part of a regime. It’s quite long and tedious.”

Whether it be grand or incremental, Smith’s eyes have always been set on the end goal, the bigger picture, but a sense of balance is also important. From “Give Up The Fear” to “Personal”, the progression from childhood to adulthood – and easing into one’s sense of self – is bolstered by finding your community, a chosen family. Currently, she is acknowledging the need to prioritise experiences, and living to fuel the work. “I have my current crew that I work with; some of them are taking breaks to live life, which I need to do as well. You can’t write if you’re not pouring from anything.”

And with the aforementioned studio politics likely to crop up, Smith has found herself pushed to do more writing on her own, moving away from collaborating with others to find the truth of her own perspective – the message within herself.

“I’m a start-from-scratch, in-the-studio sort of girl,” she says. “I walk in like ‘this is what I want to do, this is how we’re gonna do it’, but it hasn’t really been working lately. So, I’m doing a lot more solo writing. Time to mix it up: new era.”