Known for her roles in Disney’s live-action Aladdin and horror hit sequel Smile 2, Naomi Scott is readily reintroducing herself. Speaking to Asian Tones, she unravels the heartfelt meaning behind her soulful Sylvia Plath-inspired debut album and what it means to be “a girl in process”. 




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Naomi Scott is more than an industry-saturated Spotify page. Flicking through her discography, you can find uber-inflated track stats (songs from fan-raving films, 2011’s Lemonade Mouth still holds strong, with the album’s streaming profile amassing a punchy 1.9 million monthly listeners) ranking in her popular listings. Spelling it out can feel a bit gauche; it’s a fame-adjacent boom that Scott is indubitably aware of, often making note of the roles she played in several soundtrack successes. But with the reveal of F.I.G (Fall Into Grace, which doubles up as a Sylvia Plath-inspired reference), Scott has been tactfully tinkering away at her melodious debut album. The soulful, dreamy 11-track record is charming, riffing off silky R&B-infused harmonies, with Scott playing with the clarity and  tone of her voice. It’s a self-appointed project that channels her quick wit and personality, much more than her Hollywood anointed characters possibly could. 


It’s a bright Friday afternoon when Scott jovially pops up on screen. She’s mid WIP, in London, converting her mother-in-law's garage into a makeshift stage. Her new-era fiery copper-pink hair is as eccentric as ever, the very same striking burnt orange-red marked on her album cover. It’s a new beginning, in many ways for Scott. F.I.G is more than a literary reference - it’s recognition of some priority reshuffling among the last four years of the actress's life. “When you're oscillating around what an album will become, this very fully formed thing, you're not super didactic about it. I certainly wasn't going: oh, I've got an idea, The Bell Jar,” she says. “It all kind of happened gradually. It's just where you're at. It's looking at the decisions you've made when you were younger. It's mourning different versions of your life.” Something of a teen star, Scott was ushered into the spotlight with the breakout success of a Disney Channel movie at only 17 years old. From there, her name grew bigger, bagging projects with directors Steven Spielberg, Guy Ritchie, Elizabeth Banks and Parker Finn. Music, often would fall into her roles, with her breaking into ballads or adding vocals to a glimmering pop soundtrack. Yet, the 32-year-old hadn’t really found her distinct voice. “It’s all about the timing for me; I felt as though I was cosplaying something and I didn't really know who I was as an artist. We'd always come out with a good pop song, but was it a Naomi song? I didn’t know what that was,” she says. So, Scott revisited where she first began: the piano and writing fresh-faced lyrics without a care for how they’d sound: “I found myself writing these different versions of me: some were closer to home, some were playing out fantasies, and some were a really fun way to write from a really emotional, truthful place.”


F.I.G, then, was Scott emerging as her own. The concept was lightly steered by a moving, semi- existential scene in Netflix’s  Master of None which featured The Bell Jar, as Scott began to reflect on her own creative possibilities. She jokes, probing the question of whether she actually read the book (“Imagine, if after five years I’d not!” she laughs, before softly revising her comment: “You know what, it’s actually fine if someone doesn’t.) So, drifting from screen artist to a full-fledged musician came with its challenges, but the fame factor wasn’t the biggest barrier you’d think. “Whether that be decisions I've made or if that’s just been the trajectory of my career, I haven't entered into a kind of fame exchange,” she admits. The reality is not much has changed in Scott’s world. “My life is very similar to how it was 15 years ago. Obviously, I've changed; I've morphed emotionally and as a person, but situationally, my life and my friends have remained the same,” she adds. “Even dipping into making a movie, you go and promote a movie, you go to New York, and you do Jimmy Kimmel and it all looks like this thing because people wait outside, but that ain't my life – I get on the tube every day!” Scott's brushes with fame are not the sneaky paparazzi encounters you’d imagine, but rather wholesome conversations on public transport. “Honestly, nine times out of 10, it's brown girls from the age of 17 to 30, the nicest demographic of people that come up to me. We chat and they could be my cousin! It's so lovely. The reason I say that is there wasn't really a breaking down of [myself] that had to happen [to become this]. It was more allowing who I actually am to seep into what I'm doing, which I haven't been able to do other than show my personality in an interview. My world and my lived experience — where I'm from and the nuance of that has never really come into play when it comes to the characters that I've played in movies.”

Fame, then, is less the clamour and more about the characters. Scott is often cast as an American, with little in common with her roles. “Back in the day, when you were racially ambiguous — I always think of Zoe Saldaña, because this girl, they're always slapping some sort of label on her” she says. “She's fantastic and has had a fantastic career, but she's even spoken about this herself. There’s this kind of thing which meant that, for me, I was perceived in these contexts. Now, what’s exciting is that music is such an opportunity for me to present myself and my actual taste and artistry, and it was more about how I'm informing the world building that I'm doing.” Taking things solo, Scott is stepping out independently (she makes a point of crediting her hard-working team, one that includes her husband). “When we were talking about the DIY ethos, it kind of made me laugh, because I love that sometimes two things can be true at once, where there's an intention behind it and there's also a necessity because of independent music,” she says. Limitations for Scott, while inevitable, present as an opportunity to innovate and lean into experimental creativity. “You can give someone all the budget in the world and it doesn't necessarily mean that [the outcome] will speak to me,” she says candidly. “ Don't get me wrong, I do think that given more budget, given more leeway, we are going to be able to do some really fantastic things. I wanted to showcase what we could do and what I could do, even with the visuals, even on a small scale. But you're right, it means that it also becomes a part of this idea of a girl in process. I'm not coming out with this big machine behind me. Everything comes from me and my very small team. My creative director, my husband directed ‘Grace’ with me, and my manager who's always down to trying to make things happen. It's a long way to lay that out because it's such a good question; you've almost helped me break it down myself. It's more about allowing who I am to inform my artistry than it is about having to change or rebuild anything.”

Photo by Eloise Parry

The paced drums of album opener ‘Hellbent’ are warm, an airy playback that you could hear in a Solange or Phil Collins track. The song came from Scott’s Norwegian producer Lido who shared it after the pair had spent three years making F.I.G. Her raspy honey vocals are entrancing, a delightfully early 2000s-tinged track, one that surprisingly wasn’t rolled out as a single. Instead, previously released songs ‘Cherry’ and ‘Sweet Nausea’ took the lead. “It was the only song that I've ever not written from the ground up,” she says. “But, when something fits, it fits. It doesn't matter where it comes from; it just felt correct. When Lido sent me that demo, I was saying these drums need to be injected into my veins! I was so obsessed with the drums on this track. I can't explain it.” It’s a straight shooting song, but, as Scott puts it, there’s nowhere to hide. “It's very direct and it is that thing that you just said - that line of saccharine - and I'm always very cognizant of my voice. For me, there's a purity and a clarity to my voice that needs to be in the right context, otherwise it could go too saccharine.” 


Scott’s vocals don’t feel ill-fitting or hard-pressed on this project, rather there’s a sense of harmony. Instead, F.I.G feels like a moment that’s been overdue. Her style, while varied, comes into play with a technical skill: she can effortlessly mimic singing styles and the tone around her. “I can imitate and I can sing. There's more I can do with my voice, but I really love the idea of restraint. I always think of someone like Billie Eilish. She talks about not necessarily being a belter, but her voice can do things. It's even like Ariana, she doesn't always give it, it's always a taste and she knows when to simplify,” she says. “One thing I knew for sure was vocal layering was going to be so important and thinning out space with breathy stacks, and that's obviously a very Janet coded thing. It's a very Twigs kind of thing, also Solange as well. There's a soulful quality that also helps balance things out.” Scott’s online discography is a rich mixture of movie moments and her own in-progress discography, something she is still reflecting on. “With [Aladin’s] ‘Speechless’, I hate the way my voice sounds on that song. The one that they did to the music video, where I'm singing with the orchestra, felt a bit better. But the one that's in the movie, it's awful,” she says. “I'm not a musical theatre gal. It doesn't suit my voice; It's just not for me. I hate the way my voice sounds in that song. 'She's So Gone', I think my voice sounds great on that. I think it's the control. I was 17 singing that song. I can't even remember going into the booth when I recorded it .” However, in Smile 2, Scott was able to lean into her ability to imitate again. “I used Alexis Kesselman who produced three of the five of my songs. I used her as a bit of a blueprint, because she was giving that white croaky girl pop thing so I'm just imitating. We wrote 'Death Of Me' together after we'd shot the movie and I'm belting on it, but it sounds very warped.”


Balancing a music career alongside acting roles is no easy task, even if you can pull together a DIY stage to practice your soon-to-be set. The outcome, then, is to do whatever feels right with it. “I owe it to myself. You just have one life, so I might as well lean into the artist that I want to be,” Scott says. “The way I almost think about it, I want to be the version of a pop version of what I would have fucked with or what I would want to see. I'm making things where if I saw it myself, I'd think that’s fire.” 


As Scott’s career continues to build, there are artists she admires: Redcar (formerly Chris and the Queens), Caroline Polachek and, of course, Kate Bush. There’s an unwavering sense of justice to do things right, enmeshed in Scott’s sense of performance. She took to dancing through the streets of Ilford for her music video for ‘Gracie’, making the most of the small budget she could manage and shooting on 35mm film. “Don't try to do something that's not where you're at. We didn’t have the budget to shut off the street, but that combined with film, the choreography and it feeling more like we're observing - I never look at the camera - which were all very intentional decisions,” she explains. “It's still a miracle we pulled off that music video.  I literally grew up going to that Nando's around the corner. It's a scrappy process and it's about finding people that are down, because, sometimes, that's where the magic is.”


Now, with a London show pencilled in for November, Scott is steadily course correcting, placing projects and plans into a schedule that feels honest to her. “I just want to be in things that I would want to watch. It doesn't mean that those things are inevitably going to do well or succeed. It's not about a sure thing of this being great,” she says openly. “ There's so much that's out of our control when it comes to movie making, but it comes to people involved, the filmmaker and feeling like it matches my taste, that's where I'm at.” With F.I.G now out, Scott is making her mark on her own terms. As a star of the screen and, now, a solo musician, she muses on what movies best resonate with the force of F.I.G. “It's like I need to go on Letterbxd!” she laughs, picking up her phone, pulling together a quickfire list. “I would say, emotionally, Past Lives. For vibe, it's Bend It Like Beckham. The soundtrack embedded like Beckham is actually kind of on point. Red Alert, Basement Jaxx, it kind of is an ode to that kind of sound. Thematically, I’m going for Sister Midnight.”


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You can listen to Naomi Scott's brilliant debut album, F.I.G, where ever you get your music.

Singer, songwriter and artist Naomi Scott is the product of patience, self-discovery and years of considered craft. For as long as long as she can remember, music has been a constant thread in her life, always there, slowly clarifying its path in her mind as she steadily honed what her own artistry might look and sound like. Now, it all comes together with debut album F.I.G, an artistically-rich, world-building body of work that is smart, considered and intoxicating. Deeply influenced by gospel, ‘80’s pop and the alt-pop heroes of her youth, the album fully represents her, both as an exciting, informed musician, and an inquisitive, empathetic mind.