Naomi Scott Comes Into Her Own

The transition from actor to musician sometimes feels like a much harder trick to land than the reverse, but Naomi Scott has always been a musician first and foremost. It just so happens that her acting career took off when she was still young, propelling her to great heights that left her with less time to create music the way she’s always wanted. But now, with the release of her debut album F.I.G, she’s finally channeled her voice into her most complete work yet, and in doing so has found a new perspective that’s sparking her creative growth. “I’m in this phase of wanting to be very intentional about what I’m building towards,” she says. “Trying to define what looks like a successful, healthy, sustainable exchange in terms of releasing music and touring and what all of these things look like for me, it’s something I’m very cognizant of and something that I’m wanting to be very intentional about because I think I believe in not skipping any steps growing in the right way. It’s kind of carving out a space for myself and a way of doing music that is almost bespoke to me.” In that, F.I.G isn’t just an expression of her musicality; it’s also a demonstration of a newfound artistic freedom, and it’s the force that’s guiding her entire outlook at the moment.

While F.I.G is the fullest realization of Scott’s musical sensibility, her vocal abilities have already been well documented in film. As an actor, one of her earliest roles was the Disney Channel movie-musical Lemonade Mouth alongside Hayley Kiyoko, and she gained widespread global recognition in 2019 when she was cast as Jasmine in the live-action adaptation of Aladdin and starred in the latest reboot of Charlie’s Angels. More recently, she earned her stripes as a scream queen in the acclaimed horror film Smile 2—even here, she plays a pop-star, and naturally performed her character’s songs for the soundtrack. Throughout this time, Scott released standalone singles and EPs, but none of them amounted to a larger body of work that served as an artistic statement. Despite all of her success in the movie industry, the music question continued to nag her. “It’s just about going, Okay, let’s go back to basics here. Why do I even want to release music? What are my goals? And defining that for myself,“ she explains. “I’ve always known that I’ve wanted to put out something that’s more intentional than just the things that I’d released ten years ago.”

In answering those questions, Scott only had to look inward. Scott already had the experience of being paired with producers and musicians for sessions to create songs, but the experience and the results felt impersonal. “There are some fantastic, incredibly talented people that I was in rooms with, but I always felt like I didn’t know who I was as an artist yet,“ she says. “What we would come out with would feel like a good, decent pop song, but I was like, This is happening the wrong way round.” Scott realized that the whole process had to change in order for her to find out what she really wanted to write. She wanted to find that sense of joy that comes when you first make art, when the only motivations are curiosity and discovery. “I was like, I need to literally go back to the piano and write songs like I’m a teenager. I need to run towards a childlike play and not judge anything that comes out,“ she recalls. “And what came out was melodies that were nostalgic to me that made me feel something. What I was writing into felt more like there was this thematic world that began to emerge.”

She describes this writing period as a “flow state,” with individual songs coming out of her without much thought yet of creating an album. She worked with collaborators Daphne Gael and Goldwash on writing, and after hearing Norwegian producer Lido’s work on Jordan Ward’s album Forward, she reached out to him and he agreed to serve as the primary producer on F.I.G. Together, they crafted a sonic soundscape that was inspired by eighties pop and nineties R&B alike (Scott references “Englishman In New York” by Sting, and that corresponding era of his work that she wanted to evoke; other influences include Phil Collins, Janet Jackson, Robyn, and Peter Gabriel). Having been raised by pastors, there’s an element of gospel as well. The album starts off with the instantly captivating and confident intro of “Hellbent,” with ethereal synths and an emotive bassline that her smooth vocals layer over. “Cut Me Loose” features additional production from Blood Orange, whose music was also an inspiration for Scott prior to their acquaintance (he’s since featured her in his music video for his song “The Field” while Scott enlisted him to shoot the video for F.I.G track “Rhythm”). The album steadily grooves from track to track over the tight thirty-minute runtime without ever losing momentum, moving from the dance-friendly sensuality of “Cherry” to more intimate and introspective “Bliss.”

The album captures Scott’s multiplicity, taking strains of emotion and playing them out in full and exploring herself through different perspectives. When she began writing the songs, she was going through a quarter-life crisis, thinking about the different ways her life and personality could have taken shape. She describes the feeling as “mourning different versions of your life,” and this subconsciously became the directive for the album. She became intentional about starting with an “emotional nugget,” as she calls it, and building around that in order to move away from the literal and create something of a fantasy. “I think there was something also cathartic about playing out different scenarios for me,“ she adds. “And it doesn’t matter which ones happened and which ones didn’t, I kind of like the ambiguity of that. I enjoy that part of it because, again, I don’t want people to think too much about me.”

One example of that urge is “Sweet Nausea,” which on the surface reads like a song about a relationship with lyrics like “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.” But the song came from an emotional “scab” that Scott kept picking at, something that she would think about over and over but could never let go. “It’s literally about something that you’ve done that you regret, and it could be the smallest thing that just makes you cringe every time you think about it,“ she explains. “Then you basically are replaying the thing over and over and over in your head because you think that if you replay it enough times, maybe it wasn’t as bad.”

She exhibits a lot of those feelings through the lens of relationships. She’s been married since her early twenties, and that experience gives her a nuanced understanding but also an endless curiosity as to how people become who they are. “I think that’s what makes me so fascinated by delving into relationship dynamics and the journey of relationships and when things work out, why they don’t work out, and is it a timing thing and what does loving someone really mean?” she says. Between the lines, there are clear emotional threads that come from seeing the dynamics that inform those around her and speculating on how a parallel version of herself would respond in the same circumstance. It’s the sound of someone breaking out of an established identity, free from constraint. That’s most apparent on the final track “Gracie,” which she calls her alter-ego (Grace is her middle name, and F.I.G stands for Fall Into Grace). “Everything she does, she owns it / And she owns it / And she got nothin’ to lose,” Scott sings before leading into a chorus with the line “I wish I had more of Gracie in my veins / ‘Cause I keep on shunning away.” It’s the embodiment of everything that comes before; this isn’t just the Naomi Scott we know, but the Gracie that only she can access.

The more Scott develops her artistry with intentionality, that version of herself might become less of an alter ego and more embedded in her personality—F.I.G is only the start. She already has her eyes set on expanding her sound, but her current tour performing these songs over and over will likely inform what comes next. “There’s a sonic world that I feel like is a more textured, organic version, almost taking this to the next stage in terms of instrumentation,“ she says. “Then, in terms of emotionally where I’m at, I think I will allow that to be a discovery process and see what comes out. I don’t know if I could go ahead and say what I think it’s going to be.”

If one thing is clear, it’s that this personal way of working has benefitted Scott and given her a way to define herself on her own terms. In support of the singles on F.I.G, she’s been either self-directing or having friends direct and co-star in music videos, through the production company she runs with her husband Jordan Spence. “It’s a two-fold thing. Number one, it’s budget,“ she ssys. “Number two, I do believe that it’s also a real stamp in the ground of one’s taste. As an actor, I’m in other people’s things and they dictate what that thing becomes. You’re just like a color used in a painting. So I think what’s really exciting about the music is it feels like it’s actually me as an artist, and this is my taste, right?”

By working this way, Scott is also becoming more discerning with what she wants to put out on screen, both in her own acting career and through her production company. She’s been in the entertainment industry long enough to understand how the business works, and now she’s arrived at a place where she’s exerting more control over her output. “I think that’s probably why I’m so patient and being so thoughtful and intentional, even about what I’m doing on the acting side and what I’m building, is because I would love to also be in things I would like to watch,“ she says. “I want to build that community of people. So much of it is the exercise of continuing to hone one’s taste and remaining very curious.“

F.I.G is out now. Scott continues her North American tour tomorrow at Lincoln Hall, Chicago.