Victoria Monét has long been considered an underdog. As far back as 2009, when she first chased her dreams of becoming a musician from Sacramento to Los Angeles, she’s spent much of her time out of the spotlight and confined to album liner notes as a songwriter, lending her pen to Ariana Grande and Chloe x Halle. All the while, she never lost sight of her goals as a solo artist, releasing a series of EPs that hinted at R&B greatness but never truly resonated with listeners.
“I feel like I was sometimes only relevant to people according to my proximity to another artist, and that can be disheartening when you see so much more for yourself,” explains the 34-year-old. “I wanted to be doing what I love happily and be able to sustain it and change the narrative in people’s minds that I am beneath where I should be. But it’s definitely nice to level that out and be right where I’m supposed to be.”
That would be at the forefront of R&B, a mountain she’s steadily climbed for well over a decade. With the release of her debut full-length “Jaguar II” in August, Monét was suddenly catapulted into solo stardom on the back of the cooly confident single “On My Mama,” a rattling head-nodder that became her first single as a headliner to hit number one on a Billboard chart, with quotables for days (i.e. “I’m so deep in my bag like a grandma with a peppermint”). It set the stage for her first headlining tour, which yielded viral performance clips, and what she considers as one of her greatest accomplishments to date: earning seven Grammy nominations for the 2024 awards, including record of the year and best new artist.
“It seemed like the end of my underdog story and era,” she says. “Everything I’ve been working towards just came to such an affirming point, and I was really in shock for the week.” Monét had been nominated before, for her work on Grande’s “Thank U, Next” and Chloe x Halle’s “Do It,” though never for her own music. The cherry on top: Her two-year-old daughter Hazel, who is featured on single “Hollywood” alongside Earth, Wind & Fire, became the youngest Grammy nominee in history when the song was announced in the best traditional R&B performance category. “We thought about all of those things, and then when it happened, it was like oh my god, it worked!’
Monét isn’t exactly sure what to credit for her sudden ascent — was it the singing, dancing, songwriting, or all of the above? — but it’s clearly rooted in the music. “Jaguar II” puts a fresh spin on classic ’70s R&B signifiers, from the gliding funk groove of “Smoke” featuring Lucky Daye to the shag carpet brass on “How Does It Make You Feel.” It only helps that Monét, whose dance roots go back to her days studying under Jabawockeez, is a hats-wearing multihyphenate — kind of like Janet Jackson, she says, who she idolized growing up.
Still, she sees this as only the beginning, even though she put out her first project in 2014. She initially envisioned her “Jaguar” series as a trilogy, but instead scrapped the third installment in favor of a deluxe version of the second, hoping to collect more fans along the way. “I’m hoping that people who do find me now are along for the ride for the long run, or stay around until I do a Vegas residency when I’m 70 or something,” she says. “I’m just excited for the journey. I feel like it’s definitely uphill right now.”
