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At her Los Angeles home, Victoria Monét sits perched on the edge of her off-white couch, enjoying the stillness in the moments leading up to her sophomore album, “Frequency of Love,” dropping in less than 48 hours.
A lit candle with three wicks burns in front of her as she gazes at the open-format living room abutting a kitchen fit for a Michelin chef. Just next to it is a shelf proudly displaying her three Grammys, including the one she won for best new artist in 2024, the culmination of over a decade’s worth of hard work and, above all, determination.
The 37-year-old, clad in a white tank top, loose gray sweatpants and white gym socks, looks back on the years that went into building the home to her liking. “When I first came to this lot of land, it was literally just the foundation of the house and dirt for days,” she says. Two years ago — just a month before she became the biggest story out of music’s biggest night — the floor was covered in brown construction paper, and a towering scaffold reached towards the ceiling. Today, it’s an oasis that radiates warmth, all soft browns and tans with an infinity pool that glistens in the backyard. “What’s crazy is I’m not home all that much,” she admits. “It does feel like a vacation to be home.”
Part of that is because Monét has been racing to finish “Frequency of Love,” sending back and forth new mixes for tracks just before our interview on Wednesday afternoon. Up until now, Monét has taken a more patient approach to her career, a testament to the power of playing the long game. She started pursuing her dream of being a solo act as far back as 2009, when she first moved to Los Angeles, but gradually rose to prominence as a songwriter for others, including Ariana Grande and Fifth Harmony. It wasn’t until 2023’s “Jaguar II,” her debut album, that she finally hit her stride, armed with a sound descended from smoky ’70s soul and a fully formed vision to match.
With “Frequency of Love,” she took her time, too. Instead of striking while the Grammy iron was hot, she settled into home life, raising her daughter Hazel as a single parent and going on “side quests,” which included graduating from culinary school this past May and publishing the children’s picture book “Everywhere You Are,” a New York Times bestseller. She had also been battling vocal issues that changed the sound and shape of her tenor, complicating the recording process.
Today, though, the pace is unusually more hurried as she’s focused on fine-tuning “Frequency of Love” until the last possible moment, ensuring that the devil is truly in the details. “We really believe that this album could be played as a classic for years,” she explains of the record, executive produced by Monét and Camper, known for his work with Usher and Brandy. “So we want to make sure it’s everything we want it to be, even up to the pressures of the label being like, ‘Turn it in now!'”
The resulting album is a 22-track fantasia that shifts in mood and genre, an homage to the music that raised her and the person she’s become. The project is predicated on the theme that the title suggests — love of self, love of others, love for her daughter Hazel — while embracing a swath of styles spanning quiet storm to smooth, finger-snapped R&B. Monét explains that the album “picks up where we left off publicly,” referencing when she walked the Grammy carpet in 2024 with Hazel, who was then only three years old, along with Hazel’s father.
“You see her dad [with her] because she’s there, but we were already separated, and ‘All I Need'” — the crackling, mellifluous opener — “is like, OK, as long as I have my daughter, I can survive any of this, any of the chaos post-Grammys. The pressure, the separation… I already have a love of my life, notwithstanding the relationship not working out.”
What follows is a mix of songs dedicated to Hazel and her experience venturing back into the dating pool while balancing work. She rounds out the world with a robust slate of guests including Bruno Mars, SZA, Lucky Daye, Bryson Tiller, Chloe and Leon Thomas, plus her mother, cousin and aunt alongside the Sunday Service Choir (“No Love Like Yours (Interlude)”). It’s a step beyond the velvet-lined core of “Jaguar II,” trying on different musical outfits to reach a fresh new endpoint. Despite its lengthy tracklist, “Frequency of Love” stands as one of the best R&B albums of 2026, a portrait of an artist with a talent that’s expanded the boundaries she’d set just a few years ago.
It’s a remarkable show of endurance given the choppy waters she faced following her Grammy wins. She beams when looking back on that night, mentioning her meeting Celine Dion and Shania Twain as a highlight. But she soon realized that those encounters connected with her on a deeper level as she was silently grappling with a persistent tension in her voice that made it difficult for her to sing and speak. She had noticed that her grip on her vocals wasn’t consistent, particularly amid the flurry of appearances leading up to the Grammys, and after coming back down to earth, she started looking for a remedy.
“I was struggling,” she says, her demeanor softening. “I feel like it was because of so much stress and pressure that as a Taurus, it was in my throat chakra or not really speaking my mind and doing what I want to do. It had built up in my throat and you could hear it in my singing voice and interviews. And if you look, you’ll be like, oh, her voice is about an octave deeper.”
Monét recalls her voice being so limited that, even here in this living room, she was unable to speak loudly enough to call Hazel down from the second floor. With the Grammy promotional and press blitz behind her, Monét went to see a neurologist, rheumatologist and speech pathologist. A doctor in Boston told her there was nothing wrong with her vocal cords or neural function, and she tried muscle relaxants to loosen her throat but didn’t want to develop a dependency, so she stopped taking them. The realization that her issues stemmed from her state of mind came slowly, and she gradually gained control over her voice by developing a lifestyle that catered more to her mental health.
“The cycle I was doing, I had to break it all down, turn to God, turn to spirituality and calmness,” she says. “I was doing physical things, too. I had a lot of acupuncture, stretch classes, breath work, meditations. It really makes a huge difference… Slowly but surely, even within the record, I would make songs and as I got better, I would record them [and realize] there’s more freedom here. Then it started to change the melody choices. I’m like, well, since I can go higher, let me try this melody. It just allowed for so much more creativity vocally and in melody passes. The happier I got, the better my voice got.”
Musical output was slow, but Monét did follow her Grammy wins with the deluxe edition of “Jaguar II” in October 2024. After touring and campaigning in support of the record, it was a strange choice that, from the outside, looked like an attempt to capitalize on the momentum of a cycle that had already reached its natural conclusion. “I’d like to forget that happened,” Monét says. “There was no thinking. It was contractual, and I really didn’t want to do it, and I bet you could tell. I didn’t feel like I was ready, and I thought that the Grammys were a great way to end the ‘Jaguar’ chapter. I’d rather put out a single that’s the start of a new thing.”
On a professional level, Monét had also begun to explore the best path forward when it came to the team around her. Since 2018, she had been with her manager Rachelle Jean-Louis, who was the first person standing on stage with her at the Grammys that she thanked as she accepted the award for best new artist. But in September 2025, news broke that Monét had signed with Full Stop Management under Jeffrey Azoff, Anna Savage, Shawn Holiday and Sam Weiss. Monét explains that she wanted to expand her team to meet the demands of the moment, and that there were “a lot of things coming our way where we needed help and I wanted to get a partner that maybe had that experience.”
In October 2025, Jean-Louis filed a $500,000 lawsuit against Monét alleging breach of contract and unfair competition. The suit claims that she tendered her resignation after learning that Monét had been taking meetings with other managers. Monét would not comment on the suit itself as it’s ongoing litigation, but insists there is “no bad blood.” “I’m trying to disconnect the emotion from it and just realize that this is a business thing,” she says. “Maybe there’s going to be a time in the future [for] forgiveness or understanding or grace or reconciliation. But right now I have so much more to focus on.” (Jean-Louis declined Variety‘s request for comment.)
“Frequency of Love” represents new beginnings for Monét, who kicked off this chapter not with an upbeat song in the lineage of her breakthrough hit “On My Mama,” but with the ballad “Let Me.” “It was an opportunity for me to be vulnerable and lead with voice,” she says, acknowledging the discourse surrounding it following its release — Why lead with a slow song when you can do so much more? — yet reveling in its resonance after it reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Adult R&B Airplay chart.
She followed with “Reach Out,” a slinky Kaytranada- and D’Mile-produced single accompanied by a dazzling music video that sent the Twitter-sphere into overdrive. With choreography from frequent collaborator Sean Bankhead, the visuals felt like a return to form, one that fans had long been anticipating. Monét says much of that was because she personally invested in its vision, something she often does. “There’s a video budget, and then there’s what Victoria wants, which is always above the video budget,” she says. “I’m still willing to invest in these things because I do feel like people deserve to see really great music videos and really great dance numbers and entertainers deserve an opportunity to showcase their personal skills.”
With “Frequency of Love” just hours away, Monét turns her attention to her upcoming headlining tour, kicking off in Raleigh on October 27 and powering across the United States through the end of the year. She’s fresh off a summer stint opening for Mars on the European leg of his “The Romantic” trek, but is focused on how to create her own headlining show with impact. “It feels more theatrical to me this time,” she says. Bankhead will be the choreographer (“of course”) and renowned musical director Adam Blackstone will thread the sonic needle. “It’s a little more jazzy, but they’re still gonna get those dance breaks. I’m feeling a lot more subdued and clean and classic, classical energy. So it’s going to feel more like that, but still really energetic.”
Monét is aware of the pressure bearing down on her, but she’s learned to take it in stride. She’s soft-spoken as she looks at the long road ahead, and for now, she’s just going with the flow. “I’m on the same kind of timeline,” she says. “I put ‘Jaguar’ out, then I went on tour, Grammy noms, and then this time I’m behind this deadline. I have the album, then tour, then whatever happens, God willing comes. You know what I mean?”
