Victoria Monét, the songwriter the Grammys called new after 14 years writing for others

Victoria Monét

Photo: Emma / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	May 1, 1989 Georgia
Occupation	Singer
Awards	Grammy Award for Best New Artist · Grammy Award for Best R&B Album · Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical

For most of her working life, the most famous song Victoria Monét had a hand in was a breakup anthem sung by somebody else. She co-wrote thank u, next and 7 rings for Ariana Grande, shared in an Album of the Year nomination for a record that did not carry her name, and spent years singing demos in the hope that a label would keep her voice on the finished track. When the Recording Academy finally named her Best New Artist, she had been writing professionally for well over a decade, and a loud part of the internet treated the trophy as proof that the category no longer meant anything. Her second album, Frequency of Love, is the first record she has made since being told, officially, that she was new.

Atlanta is where Victoria Monét McCants was born, on May 1, 1989, but she grew up as a performer in Sacramento, where her parents moved for work when she was a teenager. She sang in the church youth choir, formed her own dance group in junior high and ended up teaching at two dance studios. She talked her mother into changing the family’s address so she could join the performing arts program at Sheldon High School. Poems traded with an older cousin turned into lyrics, and a local producer taught her how records were made and pointed her to Rodney Jerkins, whom she added on MySpace.

Jerkins invited her to Los Angeles to audition for Purple Reign, a girl group he was assembling. The group signed with Motown a year later and was dropped before it released a note. Songwriting paid the rent while she waited. Her first credit was a track for Diddy Dirty Money’s Last Train to Paris, and she kept writing hooks and recording the demos herself, hoping a label would like her version enough to keep her on it as a featured singer. Atlantic Records chief Craig Kallman heard one of those demos and offered her a deal the same day; she signed as a solo artist in 2013, at a label where Bruno Mars, whom she has described as a guiding light, was a labelmate.

The songwriting résumé grew into one of the strongest in contemporary R&B and pop. Monét co-wrote material for every Grande album from Yours Truly to Positions, and the thank u, next sessions brought her Grammy nominations for Album of the Year and, through 7 rings, Record of the Year. She also wrote for Fifth Harmony, Nas, Brandy, Chloe x Halle and, on Ice Cream, Blackpink and Selena Gomez. Her own releases on Atlantic, the EPs Nightmares & Lullabies: Act 1 and Act 2 and the two-part Life After Love, reached a devoted audience and not much further. She opened for Fifth Harmony’s 7/27 Tour in 2016 and for Grande’s Dangerous Woman Tour in 2017. Monopoly, a 2019 duet with Grande, debuted at No. 70 and became her first Billboard Hot 100 entry as a performer, at the age of 29.

The turn came when she stopped waiting for a major label to set the pace. Jaguar, released independently in August 2020 through Tribe Records, wrapped her voice in funk and disco horns and drew the best reviews of her career. She planned it as the first of three parts. Her daughter, Hazel, was born in February 2021, and the trilogy shrank to two. Signed to Lovett Music and RCA, Monét released Jaguar II in August 2023, led by On My Mama, which sampled Chalie Boy’s I Look Good, climbed to No. 33 and gave her a first solo Top 40 hit. At the 2024 Grammys she received seven nominations and won three: Best New Artist, Best R&B Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical. Hazel, then aged three, became the youngest nominee in Grammy history for her laughter on Hollywood, a song recorded with Earth, Wind & Fire.

The wins changed the weather. Monét has described what followed as tall poppy syndrome: the comments that had cheered an underdog turned into versions of “She’s too old, she’s not even a new artist,” she told NME. The complaint had a technical logic, since her songs had charted for years, but it missed what the category rewards: a performer’s public breakthrough, which the industry had postponed for a decade while it used her pen on other people’s hits. “I think there was a flip from me being an underdog that everyone wanted to support,” she told the Associated Press. “If I get millions of supporters, I can also have millions of haters. But who am I paying attention to?” She has also admitted to a stretch of being “critical of everything”, herself, her voice and her body included. The new record’s rollout gave skeptics fresh material. Monét framed it with Michael Jackson‘s leap from Off the Wall to Thriller, then walked the comparison back: “I did not make ‘Thriller.'” Jaguar II was compact and personal; its successor runs to 22 tracks and seven featured voices, and the fair question is whether a writer who spent years making room for other singers has left enough of it for herself.

The years between the albums were not spent only in the studio. In November 2025 she launched a social account, @itschefmonet, to document an old ambition, and on May 4, 2026, she graduated from the Institute of Culinary Education as its top student in plant-based culinary arts. “Maybe rebellion,” she said of the detour. “I want to do something that I don’t get paid for, that I’m not defined by.” In February she returned with Let Me, a slow jam she said recalled older R&B songs “that weren’t just quick cuts for TikTok“; it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart. Reach Out, a house-flavored single produced by Kaytranada and her longtime collaborator D’Mile, followed in July with a video by Dave Meyers and choreography by Sean Bankhead, and the yacht-soul Juicy arrived in September. In the summer she was a special guest on the European and UK leg of Bruno Mars’s The Romantic stadium tour, including Wembley.

Frequency of Love arrived on October 2 through Lovett Music and RCA, executive produced by Camper. Monét, who came out as bisexual in 2018 and announced her separation from Hazel’s father, John Gaines, in 2023, built it around love in its romantic, parental and broader forms. SZA appears 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, while Hazel joins Leon Thomas on You Mean the World to Me. Nineties R&B runs underneath: Almost nods to Brandy’s Almost Doesn’t Count and For You reworks the Kenny Lattimore ballad. The Frequency of Love Tour opens on October 27 in Raleigh, stops at Madison Square Garden on November 24 and closes in San Francisco on December 17. Beyond it, she says she wants to try scripted television and film, a comedy among them, which would make the songwriter who waited so long for her own spotlight a beginner once again.

Selected Discography

JAGUAR (2020)
JAGUAR II (2023)
Frequency of Love (2026)

Tags: singers, Ariana Grande, Victoria Monét, Bruno Mars, Frequency of Love, Jaguar II, On My Mama

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