NAO's 'Autumn' Starts a Suite: Ten Songs, Four Seasons, All Hers

LONDON — NAO announced her new album the way she made it — on her own terms. Autumn arrives October 16, a ten-track record released independently and the first installment of a four-part series called A Soulful Suite. She shared two singles and the announcement on September 30, and the whole thing reads like a declaration of artistic freedom.

Here's the part that gets me: the initial sketches for this record were captured on a mobile phone. Two days of improvisation, recorded in her living room, narrowed from twenty to twenty-five musical ideas down to ten songs. You can hear the conservatoire in that discipline — four years of formal jazz training doesn't leave you — but the phone-recorded origin is the whole point. The voice first, the polish later. That's how you keep a record honest.

The album was developed with producer Dave Okumu, and together they've pushed NAO back toward her jazz roots — a deliberate departure from the sound of her 2025 release, Jupiter. Independence isn't just the distribution model here; it's the aesthetic. No major-label A&R shaping the edges, no committee sanding down the improvisation that started the whole thing.

NAO's voice has always been the argument for her — that unmistakable tone, the way she bends a phrase without showing the work. A four-part series built around the seasons, starting with Autumn, is a singer betting that listeners will follow her through the whole year. Ten tracks at a time. No singles-first thinking; this is an album person making an album-era move.

The independent route asks a lot of an artist and gives a lot back: total control, total responsibility. For a singer returning to her jazz training with a phone full of living-room sketches and a producer who understands the assignment, it sounds less like a risk and more like the only honest way to make this record. October 16 — movement one.

To understand why Autumn matters, rewind the catalog. NAO arrived with the For All We Know EP in 2015 and her 2016 debut album, then built one of the most quietly distinctive discographies in British R&B: Saturn in 2018, And Then Life Was Beautiful in 2021, and Jupiter in February 2025. All four albums came through RCA. Autumn is her first release outside the major-label system in a decade — on her own Little Tokyo Recordings — and the timing is the point. She started sketching it while touring Jupiter, and the road gave her the realization she keeps coming back to: “I'm performing in old skin, but I'm a new person now. I found myself thinking a lot about the kind of musician and performer I want to be.”

The answer was the beginning. Before the electronic soul, NAO spent four years studying jazz at conservatoire — Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, the whole lineage. “Jazz feels like letting go to me,” she said of the record. “That's what improvisation is, it's free-form, it's letting loose, it's shedding, it's a release. Autumn and jazz melt together really beautifully.” Autumn is the first of four records; each installment of A Soulful Suite takes a season and a genre that shaped her, which means the next three movements are NAO walking back through her own musical DNA in public.

The process matches the philosophy. After reconnecting with Dave Okumu through a tribute to D'Angelo, NAO invited him and a group of musicians into her living room for two days of loosely guided improvisation — captured, at first, on nothing fancier than her phone. Twenty to twenty-five ideas came out of those sessions; nine became the foundations of the album. “All the melodies you hear on the record are the melodies I sang on the day of those original jams,” she said. The voice first, the polish later. That's how a record stays honest.

The two singles that arrived with the announcement set the emotional temperature. “Eugene” honors D'Angelo — born Michael Eugene Archer — the artist whose tribute brought NAO and Okumu back together. “Save The World,” partly inspired by Marvin Gaye, turns outward: personal responsibility in an overwhelming world. Elsewhere on the record, “Living Room” is about connection at home, and “U R Loved” grew out of a mantra she returned to during a difficult period. “I've given up trying to get a seat at the table, and I'm creating my own,” she said — which, for an artist with four major-label albums behind her, is less a complaint than a business plan. More from the R&B world on the music page and in Anderson .Paak and Cordae's latest.