Since penning her first song in 2013, Nao has come close to mastering a particular strand of funky, high-gloss R&B. Her A.K. Paul-featuring debut single, “So Good,” arrived within months of that first songwriting attempt, creating her template for emotionally precise pop that gives away little about its creator. Her empire has expanded—after the single, she formed Little Tokyo Recordings to release a handful of EPs—as has her songwriting. Recent single “Fool to Love,” which appears on her debut album For All We Know, opens at the flash point of a doomed relationship, then takes us back through the “mindless games” and slain insecurities that helped forge her escape. The details are vague—it’s possible the tormentor is her own self-doubt—but the sense of an inspired, forcible overcoming is unmistakeable.
In the absence of lyrical biography, Nao’s hook is her voice—she sings like a giddy angel sent to live out a dream of pop stardom—which puts her out of step with recent R&B permutations cultivated in England. Where others have found transcendence by rejecting slinky, summertime beats—FKA twigs’ alien ambiguity, Grace Acladna’s lucid soul nightmares, Night Slugs’ scatty dream-grime production for Kelela—Nao, while raised on grime and garage, owes little to any discernible London lineage. Her view of modern love, delivered in a tone that oscillates between euphoria and self-examination, feels like a rebuff to digital-era romance, where the possibilities of perma-communication (the mute, the de-friend, the ghosting) have fostered a banal revolution in breakup politics. Instead, her music inhabits the arena of high-stakes R&B, where women’s voices are dominant, acrobatic, and impossible for unsympathetic listeners to tune out.
On For All We Know, Nao autopsies various relationships—with friends, lovers, outgrown versions of herself—and, having decided what went wrong, calmly takes down the perpetrators. She sings with the weight of lessons learned: “I’m wise and I’m older,” a line from “Fool to Love,” is a rare instance of personal exposition, but the sentiment was already implied. On “In the Morning,” she acts the part of a lover too polite to say it’s over. “Buried all my feelings, I’m withholding,” she sings, fretfully. “I tried to leave him signs ... Are they hard to recognize?” Following track “Trophy,” a new A.K. Paul collaboration, reboots the theme of romantic redemption, firing out a feminist takedown in the dialect of funk expressionism.
Nao’s beseeching tones imbue every line with romantic defiance, even when, as on breakout single “Bad Blood,” the lost love under her microscope is platonic. On that song’s chorus, she accompanies an armada of synth blasts with heaving sighs, as if to hack up the offending memories—“a past that couldn’t last”—from her lungs, as well as her mind. These aren’t the shallow resolutions of a woman destined to repeat her mistakes.
There are few surprises in the music, but its crisp bombast complements the vocals, playing abrasive beats against silky seduction. Nao is unafraid to fall back on shmoozy late-’90s R&B melodies, allowing snarling, maximalist synths to drag the songs into 2016. “Get to Know Ya,” produced by Jungle, opens the record with elastic funk guitars and imploring, melismatic melodies, before the GRADES-produced “Inhale Exhale” bounces it up a notch with a raunchy bass strut that melts away as melodies zipwire across octaves. The music speaks in wonky Soulquarian grooves, playing into Nao’s jazz-vocal schooling: Album highlight “Feels Like (Perfume),” a Royce Wood Junior-produced ballad, ventilates D’Angelo’s polluted soul with sultry boudoir vibes and an improbably perfect George Harrison-style chorus.
At 54 minutes, the 18-track record begins to feel a little baggy, its uncharismatic drums and textural familiarity giving Nao’s paragliding voice one job too many. Even when overlong, though, the songs can impress with their breadth: “Blue Wine,” a moment of cosmic relief, winds down to slow-jam tempo, but blossoms into something exquisitely languid and sprawling, a distant cousin to Janelle Monáe’s elaborations on R&B balladry. Again, on “Blue Wine,” the music feels emotionally descriptive without the need for disclosure—“broken emotions” are the narrator’s ailment, we’re told. But when vagueness is a catalyst, rather than a stand-in for passion, its evasive profundity teaches you to look for what’s missing.
