It’s a warm October afternoon in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene Park as kids, parents, and the underemployed enjoy their last few days without a jacket. Meanwhile, Jorja Smith is cozy in a sweater dress and Nikes, eyeing down a photographer’s lens. She’s only 20, but she carries herself with an uncanny confidence—not the bravado of youth so much as the grace of someone with four or five decades to lean on, someone who understands how less can be more.

On record, Smith’s vocals suggest the elegance of a seasoned professional as they eschew showy runs for startling emotional honesty. In the park, she talks about everything from skincare routines to universal health care with the air of an expert. But it’s in the little moments that you’re reminded she’s just barely out of her teens, like when she stops to ogle over a poodle mix named Pumpkin, or her rampant usage of the word “sick” to describe anything and everything she deems worthy.

Jorja Smith: "Blue Lights" (via SoundCloud)

Smith introduced herself to the world last year with “Blue Lights,” a contemplative slice of boom-bap soul dealing with the strained dynamics between Black men and the police. “Imperfect Circle,” from her 2016 debut EP, Project 11, is another politically-charged record about the seemingly endless prejudice that fuels racism. Though Black artists who take on social injustice in song are often tasked with the burden of providing solutions to such intractable problems, the way Smith grapples with their continuity instead feels courageous in itself.

Her voice, soothing and substantial, is filled with an aching that suggests she was born to counsel the world’s suffering. She’s tried on a variety of styles thus far, from boho R&B to fizzy pop to EDM, her vocals acting as strong connective tissue. So strong that when she tells me, “My voice makes the genre because I sound like me on all my songs—I’ve made my own genre: Jorja Smith,” the remark doesn’t seem especially cocky as much as a point of fact.