Midway through our February afternoon chat, Naomi Scott asks the sort of question that, frankly, should be unaskable: "What is she, where do we place her?"
She's referring to herself, but she's speaking from the perspective of composite audiences and Hollywood execs trying to classify a half-Indian, half-white actress playing American roles. The system faced a quandary: How do we find a proper role for an objectively beautiful, talented actress-singer who just costarred in a billion-dollar Disney movie?
Following her star turn as Jasmine in Disney's 2019 live action adaptation of Aladdin, Scott didn't appear in another movie for half a decade. Her ever-reliable Wikipedia page says it was due to a hiatus. The 32-year-old offers a more practical explanation: "The roles weren't there." Suitable ones, at least. As she notes, those roles can be hard to find for people without industry aunts and uncles to give them advice. A global pandemic didn't help. Neither did being of mixed race. "As a person of color, you don't necessarily get the cat-with-nine-lives thing," she says. When she returned to the big screen for her acclaimed performance in Smile 2, it was as a pop star. If all goes commercially well, this time next year, she'll be one in real life, too.
Due for release next Friday, Scott's debut album, F.I.G, is alt-pop that's as intimate as it is stylish — a retro mosaic pulling aesthetic cues from Phil Collins, Robyn, and Kate Bush and other figures from pop music's past. For tracks like "Cherry," she swirls a whispery soprano with a playful sense of flirtation for a track that sounds like Janet Jackson just copped a British accent. Framed in supple electric guitar licks and atmospheric percussion, "Sweet Nausea" sees Scott languish in the best kind of unease: "Baby, hope you don't mind if I stay here/ Spin me around until I'm sick to my stomach/ Just the way I want it." Her vocals are smooth and sensuous as pillow talk with someone you don't have to pretend to like. The Lido-produced soundbeds are minimalistic enough to hug her tone like a blanket. Versatile and delicately powerful, F.I.G is Scott's most deliberate work to date. And that's because she's the one that handled the deliberating.
"With music, you have more leeway to lead and dictate the process yourself and dictate the structure and dictate what the shape of making it looks like," she tells me of the difference between making movies and making albums. "You're not fitting into someone else's schedule, to someone else's vision, someone else's time restrictions, and creative choices." In other words, she doesn't have to worry about where someone else believes she should be placed.
And this time, she got to choose her own cast. The first person she chose was Lido, a producer who's worked with everyone from Halsey to Ariana Grande. It began with a June 2023 DM Scott sent Lido after hearing his work with Jordan Ward. Then there was a FaceTime session. Then they realized they lived about five minutes away from each other in Los Angeles. Then came an informal partnership, which lasted a few weeks before Scott crystallized the connection by bringing a curry dish to his house before asking him to executive-produce her album.
"Some sessions aren't really about making music," Lido tells me. "That one was more about conversation and getting on the same page about what we wanted to do together." A part of "getting on the page" was looking through pages. Apparently, a lot of them. As they began putting together the LP, Scott showed Lido a "humongous" PDF filled with music references and concepts to consider when building her opus.
"I remember looking at it and thinking, ‘Oh, you've seen people present stuff like this before and now you're putting together your own," remembers Lido. "That immediately told me she cared about building a world around the music — she wasn't just looking for some songs that sounded good. She was trying to create a whole thing."
That summer, Scott began recording in Lido's pool house-like home-studio in LA. When she wasn't recording there, she'd head to Lido's Norway space, a former elementary school he copped a few years back. There would be cooking, lots of tea, and lots of conversation. Even as Scott was in control of her album, her work with Lido was deeply collaborative.
The writing part seemed to come naturally. Lido noticed that while sifting through Scott's Dropbox, which was filled with electric piano-based demos that became the basis of the album. "The second I heard them I thought, ‘These are incredibly well-written songs.' I was like, ‘Oh, the hard part is over.' We already know what this is," he says. "This is obviously someone who is very well-read and someone who has worked with dialogue. This is someone who has stories and knows how to articulate themselves. And that makes your job as a producer — who is supposed to encourage and inspire those things out of people — that much easier."
That level of songwriting nuance didn't always show in her earlier work. Released in 2014 and 2016 respectively, her freshman and sophomore EPs, Invisible Division and Promises, play out like fractured glimpses rather than unified visions. There are clumsy ballads ("Running") and at least one pedestrian American Apparel pop anthem ("Motions"). The vocal talent is obvious, but in her youth — and, not in complete control of her sound — it all feels a bit scattered. "I was trying things," she says of those earlier recordings. "I knew the next time I released music, it's got to be incredibly intentional."
That intentionality both grounds and elevates F.I.G, which Scott says she re-cut three times because she wanted to sing every song perfectly. Where her previous EPs presented as a young woman trying out aesthetics before chucking them onto the fitting room floor, F.I.G is a self-tailored dress fit for runways. As accomplished as it is, Scott doesn't think the album represents her ceiling — even if conventional, prescriptive career arcs might have seeped into her mind.
"The idea of what it meant to be a woman in pop was so narrow [and] so ageist: this is what you do, and by this point, by 21, you have X," she says. But the success of other vocalists on the other side of 30 gave her perspective. "We're seeing incredible artists in their mid-to-late 30s and 40s. You've got Robyn, Caroline Polachek, Christine And The Queens — people whose art is so interesting," Scott says. "The minute I [rejected the idea that it was too late] I said, 'Wait, I have an opportunity here to build and carve out and craft my own thing. Like go do it yourself.'"
Thus far, doing it for herself has resulted in a dope album. Hopefully it will result in her hitting the road more often, too. Recently, Scott opened for her good pal Dev Hynes when Blood Orange played London. Lido's a fan of Scott's live show: "She's in a category of artists that's becoming smaller and smaller — people who sound the same on stage as they sound on the record." It's a gift Lido thinks will help propel Scott's musical career. "I could definitely see her music becoming just as big, if not bigger, than the acting side of things."
While she's coming off a Smile 2 performance that probably should've gotten an Oscar nomination, it does feel like Scott has a more intimate connection to her own music. And why wouldn't she? She's in control. It's hers. If you let her tell it, it's her. "When you're acting in a movie, you are one of the collaborators, but you are not the visionary for it. You are a tool being used," she tells me. "Music is just way more personal. It's yours."
F.I.G is out 3/20 via ALTER Music.
