Nao is trying to articulate how it feels to be on the verge of releasing a new album. When this thing that’s been yours and yours alone has to be launched into the world. “It feels really similar to being pregnant,” the 37-year-old mum of two decides. Her answer feels apt; we’re currently sitting in an east London cinema cafe hemmed in by buggies while a mum-and-baby screening of erotic thriller Babygirl plays next door. “It’s really exciting in the beginning, then it gets a bit tedious,” she continues. “And you’re stuck in the process because you need to finish it. Get it out.” Sometimes, she says, it can also be just as painful.
Not that you’d know it from listening to this month’s fourth album, Jupiter, a typically featherlight concoction of pillow-soft soul, experimental R&B and airy acoustic ruminations all anchored by her angelic, otherworldly voice. It also carries just a dash of the electronic-leaning “wonky funk” that saw Nao (born Neo Joshua) hailed as one to watch when she emerged in 2015. But Jupiter’s overarching sense of contentment has been hard won after years spent battling an illness that prevented her from touring.
Jupiter is a sequel of sorts to 2018’s Grammy and Mercury prize-nominated second album Saturn, an emotionally tumultuous opus named after the astrological concept of Saturn return, a sort of crossroads a person reaches roughly every 27 to 29 years, before entering the next stage of their life. While that album dealt with the ups and downs of her 20s, 2021’s And Then Life Was Beautiful, released into post-pandemic’s upside-down world, searched desperately for joy. Shortly before it came out, Nao revealed she’d been diagnosed with myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a disabling condition that left her profoundly fatigued and darkened by what she calls a low-grade depression. “You can only do a small percentage of what you were capable of,” she says, nursing a coffee, a rare treat while following a low-carb diet that helps her recovery (she will return to touring later this year). “For example, walking to meet you here, I’d probably have to take a taxi home. And then I’d be in bed for the rest of the day.”
Jupiter’s title was very specifically chosen because it’s “the planet of joy”, she says. “It’s a planet of good fortune and good luck. And I really wanted to bring that into my life.” She singles out the balm-like Happy People, which glides around a sun-kissed Afrobeat lilt, as a key song. “It came from realising who was important to me in my life,” she says. “I think when you’re in your 20s you’re trying to make as many friends as possible. Then you get into your 30s, you have big transitions in life, and actually the fewer people the better.”
Her candour is refreshing. When I say that she is underrated and that collaborations with the likes of Stormzy, Mura Masa, Chic, Lianne La Havas, Disclosure and Ezra Collective should have made her a household name, she doesn’t see it as a compliment. “It’s like saying you’re good enough to succeed but you haven’t quite yet. I get a lot of comments saying I’m underrated, which is fine, but I’ve had to work a lot on what my idea of success is.” While she’d love to “stream in the billions”, she’s also happy with where she’s at. “I just have to become present and think actually you’re doing all right. You’re all the things you wanted to be; you’re, I hope, still credible; you make the music that you want; you still sell out your tours, but also you’re a mum and you get to pick up your kids from school and drop them off.”
She thinks doing things at her own pace – she didn’t sign a record deal until she was 27 – has helped with her outlook. Born in Nottingham and raised mainly in London, Nao saw her early music career take place behind the scenes. At 18 her voice won her a place at London’s Guildhall School , but she struggled to believe in herself. “I’m not really sure how I got in,,” she says. She compares it to the 2014 film Whiplash, in which a jazz drummer is pushed to the brink by his instructor. “I was working at 5am in the morning to basically not be embarrassed and not be humiliated by the teachers. That definitely stayed with me for a long time.” She felt she had to “work and overwork and overwork to be on top of it.”
She stuck it out and four years later started taking any job in music she could, be it teaching, or as part of a beatbox group, or singing backing vocals for the likes of Jarvis Cocker. In 2014, a manager discovered her singing in a club and signed her. From there she started cultivating a fanbase via SoundCloud, before releasing her first EP in 2014 on her own label. After signing that label to RCA, she released her electronic-leaning debut album, 2016’s For All We Know, on a wave of hype. The album peaked inside the Top 20, which meant the pressure mounted around its follow-up, Saturn. Asked at the time how she was feeling about that album’s release, she admitted to being nervous, contemplated retirement, and joked that if people hate the album she’ll “just die”.
“Oh my gosh, did I say that?” she says now. “It’s such a snapshot into where my brain was at that time. You have all the hype and the engine kind of just went on its own like, ‘Oh, this is what’s happening to me.’ On the second album, that hype machine dies down and you’re left with, ‘OK, what? Fuck. Does anyone actually like me any more? What’s left of me?’”
Over time, as her 30s rolled out in front of her, she made the decision to stop caring about other people’s expectations. During the promotion for And Then Life Was Beautiful, she told a journalist she’d avoided songs about motherhood because she couldn’t write about it “in a way that wouldn’t put people off!” Pregnant with her second child while recording Jupiter, the album’s stripped-back highlight 30 Something features the lyric “I love my baby daughter, sometimes motherhood’s whatever”.
“We don’t get the full picture of what being a parent is until you’re in it,” she says, as we become surrounded by mums scurrying out of the film holding crying babies. “My own experience was all emotions all at once. It was like: ‘This is fucking amazing, the best thing that’s ever happened to me’, and also, literally five minutes later, ‘This is really shit’.”
With a new album that reflects a relatable urge to seek out light in a dark world, I assumed she’d have some pearls of wisdom for her younger self, that one who felt like giving up just before Saturn’s release. After a long pause and a deep breath she looks me in the eye. I’m braced for a nugget of positivity, but her answer is far more realistic. “I’d just tell her, you know, it doesn’t get any better,” she states. “You’re going to have to chill out and ride the waves. You’re going to have to get more resilient … And it’s not that deep. Maybe that’s what I’d say; it’s not that deep.”
Jupiter is out on 21 February.
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