R&B singer Victoria Monét answers her post-Grammy haters with Frequency of Love

Victoria Monét has a precise account of what winning Best New Artist did to her. It flipped her, she told The Associated Press, from “an underdog that everyone wanted to support” into something closer to a target: “If I get millions of supporters, I can also have millions of haters. But who am I paying attention to? And that’s what the album for me is about.” That album is Frequency of Love, her second studio record, and it runs 22 tracks.

On paper, her answer is love in most of its forms. Monét says the songs grew out of “what I was going through or feeling while dating,” but that the record “covers many bases, including love for my daughter, love for the world, what I want to see for it.” The daughter is literal: Hazel Monét is credited next to Leon Thomas on “You Mean the World to Me.” Around them sits a guest list that doubles as a statement of standing. SZA sings on “See You in My Dreams,” Bruno Mars on “That’s Why I Love You,” Bryson Tiller on “Single,” Lucky Daye on “Maybe” and Chlöe on “Lose Myself.”

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The sound reaches back further than the features suggest. Monét first pictured a yacht-R&B album, and that idea survives in the single “Juicy.” The record, executive-produced by Camper, is threaded with nods to ’90s R&B. “Almost” borrows from Brandy’s “Almost Doesn’t Count” for a song about being left unsatisfied. “For You” reworks Kenny Lattimore’s romantic ballad of the same name. “Care for Somebody (Interlude)” is her version of a song she first heard as a child, watching Halle Berry in Introducing Dorothy Dandridge with her grandmother.

The three singles already pull in different directions. “Let Me,” a slow jam, went to No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart. “Reach Out,” made with Kaytranada and D’Mile, is a house track with a sepia video directed by Dave Meyers and choreographed by Sean Bankhead. “Juicy” goes for the breezy yacht sound. Monét has framed the project around Michael Jackson’s leap from Off the Wall to Thriller, and on the eve of release she reined the comparison in: “I did not make ‘Thriller.’ I just made my version of what I would make with that mindset.”

That leaves the question the record cannot answer for her. An album about choosing whom to listen to arrives with five interludes and seven guest credits, two of them among the biggest names in pop and R&B. Jaguar II, the tight, personal record that won Best R&B Album, made its case in a small room; Frequency of Love asks a much larger one to hear the same person. Monét spent years writing for Ariana Grande, Blackpink, Chloe x Halle and Selena Gomez, so she knows how to make space for other voices. Across 22 tracks, the test is whether she keeps enough of it for her own.

Frequency of Love came out October 2 on Lovett Music/RCA, three years after Jaguar II and after the 2024 Grammys that gave her Best New Artist, Best R&B Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. She does not mind hearing the release called a comeback: “that makes me feel like there was a gap in time where they noticed that I was gone.” “Let Me” topped the airplay chart in June, and Monét spent part of the summer as a special guest on the European leg of Bruno Mars’ The Romantic tour. Her own Frequency of Love Tour plays 27 North American dates, opening October 27 in Raleigh, stopping at Madison Square Garden on November 24 and the YouTube Theater in Inglewood on December 8, and closing December 17 in San Francisco.

Monét also described a stretch when she was “criticizing myself, the workplace, the state of my mood, the state of music, state of voice, my body, just nitpicking everything.” The millions of haters she counted will hear Frequency of Love along with everyone else. The record is built on the bet that she has stopped counting.

Tags: SZA, Victoria Monét, Frequency of Love, Bruno Mars, RCA Records

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