“It’s been a minute,” beams singer-songwriter and producer Nao, waving me down the stairs into her east London studio. She’s shared this same space with a group of mates since she started out as a session singer for Pulp, and though she’s had her fair share of stints at fancy spots like Abbey Road, the majority of her music still starts its life here, including her highly anticipated new album Jupiter.
Last time we met, almost a decade ago, Nao (pronounced “neigh-oh”) was a rising star, riding high on buzzy collaborations with the dance duo Disclosure and musician-producer Mura Masa. That year, she had just bagged third place in the BBC’s Sound Of tipster poll (beating Dua Lipa, who came seventh) and was on the cusp of her big breakthrough moment. Not all of this attention seemed to sit easily with Nao, now 37, who told me back then that she preferred hiding behind her hands for photoshoots and recording songs out of sight in her bedroom cupboard.
“It did pile on a lot of pressure,” she says, looking back now. “You don’t have any control over how things are going to go, and that’s something I’ve had to let go of. When there was a lot of hype, I wasn’t really able to enjoy it. I wasn’t able to be very present. I was always worrying about the next song I have to pull out, and if people are gonna like it … the next show I have to do, and if it’s gonna sell out. There were a lot of question marks and worry and stress, rather than just being like, well: this is really awesome and fun, and I don’t care what happens tomorrow.”
It’s a pressure that she still feels, though she tries to resist it. “You know, it was about two days ago that I was in tears just like: ‘Oh, I don’t feel like I’m doing very well, I feel like I’m failing.’ I remember, at the end of those tears, I said: ‘I have to pick myself back up and try again tomorrow.’”
Nao (born Neo Joshua) grew up on the outskirts of east London, the youngest child in a busy house filled with blaring music and messy older siblings. “It was quite mono-cultural,” she says of her hometown. “At that time, Woodford was proper East End, working-class UK: jellied eels and going ‘down the pub’,” she says, doing her best cockney accent. “My family was quite unique in that space, because we were black. My mum was from Jamaica. I remember friends coming over, and they would be like, ‘What is that smell?’ when she was frying fish and plantain.”
“I wasn’t very self-assured or confident; I was really aware that my family set-up, and my family dynamic, was very different in the space that I was existing in,” she continues. “My parents weren’t together, and people hadn’t heard of half siblings. They were like, what’s that? I was like, I don’t know! I don’t want to explain it. Leave me alone! That’s probably where being a bit reserved and a bit unsure of myself has come from.”
When the initial attention hit, rather than diving headfirst into fast-burn pop singles tailored for the charts, Nao instead leant back into the weirdness she’d surrounded herself with as a young artist uploading demos to Soundcloud — filling her 2016 debut For All We Know with voice notes and silky, synth-loaded funk, and working with the enigmatic Jai Paul and his sibling AK Paul. An outlier in an industry obsessed with constant output, Jai Paul’s legacy is largely fuelled by a wildly influential single song: his 2007 Myspace demo BTSTU.
Though Nao is much more prolific — Jupiter is her fourth full-length record — she’s learned from her contemporaries who have resisted the impulse towards creative churn and has cultivated a steady trajectory that has outlasted the early hype. Having emerged in a time when algorithms had not yet taken hold, does Nao think things have become harder for new artists today?
“I think it’s harder,” she nods. “Basically, you’re waiting for a viral moment to take hold and hopefully carry you.” The industry itself, she adds, is also in a state of flux as social media and virality increasingly dominates over traditional promotion methods. In a year when the BBC picked Chappell Roan — already a huge household name, whose profile rose largely online — as its top pick for the Sound of 2025, does she think the establishment is lagging behind the audience?
“Well, I don’t want to talk about the BBC,” she laughs, “but those sort of worlds and establishments, like radio, or a predictions poll, or the Mercury Prize, or whatever … they must be in a constant battle at the moment.”
In Nao’s case, she resisted the pressure to constantly tour and release new music; in part, to protect herself from burn-out. 2018’s Saturn — an album of warped, astrological R&B and a raw look at heartbreak — led her to step back from the live circuit to focus on her health.
“Saturn is the planet of tough lessons, and transitions,” she says. “That was a really tough time for me, and it lasted quite a few years, honestly. I went through a really tough break-up, and I was battling this weird thing around being sort of half famous, and the paranoia that came with it. There’s a lot of stress that comes with being an artist in the public eye and a lot of the pressure to achieve. I was unwell for a really long time.”
Around this time, Nao was first diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME — a long-term condition that causes extreme tiredness. Drained and exhausted, she made the difficult decision not to tour Saturn. “It was really tough to say, actually, I don’t think I can tour this record, because I was just going backwards in my health.” Her record label was very supportive. “It was the best decision I could have ever made, because I felt like that’s when things really started aligning for my recovery.”
Jupiter — out in two weeks’ time — first began to take shape in LA, where Nao and her family briefly relocated to help with her health condition. “Something that made me feel a lot better was being in the sun, so we basically moved to LA for like six months. It’s a place where I could carry on creating, but it also expedited my recovery.” She will tour again and says that although her experience with CFS is still an ongoing journey, she feels “90 per cent recovered”.
Nao views Jupiter as a sequel to Saturn, although she’s released another since, 2021’s And Then Life Was Beautiful. That record had a very similar journey, attempting to smash through the writer’s block weighing Nao down following her birth of her first child during the early Covid lockdown. She’s since had a second child “in the normal functioning world”, and she says Then Life Was Beautiful felt very daunting: “I felt like if I don’t put out this album, then maybe I’ll just fall into the abyss of no one remembering who I am, which was obviously such an extreme idea.”
Jupiter, meanwhile, comes from a far freer place, and is more concerned with healing. “It’s the planet of joy, good fortune, wisdom and growth,” she says. “I was like, man, I feel like I’ve been through so much these last seven years.”
From the distant optimism of Better Days — which looks forward to repairing a “rocky” relationship with a “family member who I love dearly” — to the everyday gratitude at the core of 30 Something, it is an album filled with hope. “I’ve been holding on to shit that don’t belong to who I am,” she sings. “I live my life anywhere it goes,” she repeats, over and over, as the track fades out.
“Now that I’m well into my thirties, I’ve reworked my brain,” she says. “It’s actually a gift to get older. I am really grateful for where I am right now.”
