On songs like “Gabriel” and “If You Ever,” Nao is inviting and self-assured. She sings the kind of woozy romantic bops that beg for dancing under summer skies. “If you ever change your mind,” she asks on the latter, “would you fly with me?” Her voice vibrates with anticipation and nervousness, the cumulative effect something of a flutter. In its intimate explication of the personal, Saturn is heavenly.
Saturn’s most traditionally R&B single, “Make It Out Alive,” features the Inglewood-bred Top Dawg Entertainment signee SiR. After his verse, the two sing the chorus together, their voices reassuring even as their mutual destruction is all but guaranteed:
For Nao, this second single best captures what she felt while creating Saturn. “I’d hit my late 20s and everything was in flux: relationships, work life, home situation, everything,” the singer has said. “I was lost and I genuinely had to ask, ‘How do you make it out of here?’” The rest of Saturn traces Nao’s attempts to find her way out of this quicksand. The record sounds mature and lived-in. Saturn’s greatest success isn’t that it suggests that Nao has overcome all her obstacles; it’s how comfortably the singer moves through and around them.
Nao’s debut album, 2016’s For All We Know, was a stellar coming-of-age record. The reclusive singer, who’d more often shown her hands than her face, offered listeners a colorful glimpse at both her visage and her interior conflicts. Like her earlier EPs, So Good and February 15, the album was introspective and eminently listenable. Still, it was driven by chaotic mid-20s sensibilities. On “DYWM” (a stylization of “Do You Want Me,” its primary refrain) and “Get to Know Ya,” she begged for approval from a lover. On “Fool to Love,” she mourned the end of a relationship—and chided herself for having gotten involved at all. “In the Morning” and “Bad Blood” found Nao drifting away from romantic flings and longtime loved ones alike.
The songstress tied that project, named for the famous Donny Hathaway song, together with a series of voice memos, each included as a separate track. While the first three interludes were culled from Nao’s own music, the final interlude sampled the neo-soul duo Floetry’s 2002 single, “Say Yes.” These moments of curation spoke to a larger hallmark of Nao’s music: the deft threading of her influences.
Read: Donny Hathaway’s way-underrated, tragically brief soul catalog
Nao’s music exists within the broad expanse of R&B, but she reaches back into decades beyond the start of her own life when building her musical world. Often producing her own tracks along with her longtime collaborator, GRADES, Nao crafts a time-defying sound. She marries lean R&B to full-bodied funk; she sings in silver and in brass. Saturn is a trim 13-track offering, but in its 47-minute runtime, the album melds electronic production, funk, soul, and jazz sensibilities. Nao’s voice, dexterous and honeyed, glides across them all.
The artist has referred to her boundary-expanding music as “wonky funk,” a delightfully eclectic mixture of mellifluous R&B vocals and the bouncy production that characterized funk records of the 1970s. Her first public offering, the 2014 single “So Good,” paired Nao’s syrupy vocal runs with retro-futuristic production from the elusive producer A. K. Paul. Released on SoundCloud, the track soon earned Nao a dedicated following. “Wonky funk was about how to translate that sound into 2016,” she told The Guardian that July, ahead of For All We Know’s release. “So we fucked up the basslines and put some D’Angelo beats on it.”
The famously cornrowed neo-soul titan also gets name-checked on Saturn. “You can give me the voodoo,” Nao sings on the album’s standout “Orbit,” referencing D’Angelo’s 2000 follow-up to 1995’s Brown Sugar. “Like D’Angelo said, How does it, how does it feel?”
Read: Can D’Angelo transform R&B again?
“Orbit” traces the story of a lost love, a motif that recurs throughout Nao’s music. But here, Nao zeroes in on the healing that comes after. She celebrates her ability to navigate emotional pitfalls after being dismissed, to gravitate to someone new. Nao’s voice—alternately reaching toward falsetto and dipping into lower registers—echoes the agility of her lyrical arcs. “Orbit” serves as the central point of the album, dividing the artist’s growth into two distinct chapters.
Prior to the seventh track, Nao sings of pain and fear; after she is “released … into orbit,” she finds her way to a “Love Supreme.” She crests into the “Yellow of the Sun.” She keeps ascending.
