The jaguar sneaks up on you. Victoria Monét can relate. One day you could audition for a Darkchild-sponsored girl group that never got off the ground, and nine years later, you could be a celebrated songwriter picking up Grammy nominations for work on Ariana Grande’s thank u, next—and the crowd probably still don’t know your name. So Victoria Monét McCants, who’d always dreamed of becoming a triple threat, adopted the apex predator. It must have worked, because Jaguar II, originally slated as the second in a trio of EPs, was promoted to full album. Slick and professional without feeling impersonal, Monét’s first LP is fresh, populist R&B illustrated in the harvest-gold hues of the 1970s, a vision of plush velvet paintings and even plusher video treatments, an album designed to marry the analog textures of Smokey Robinson with the sparkling earworms of Keri Hilson.
The first Jaguar, released in 2020, was about the good life: Monét wrote a ballad celebrating what squats can do for your butt, a car-sex jam about hooking up with Kehlani (with Kehlani on the remix). Jaguar II lives there too, rolling up with the weed-blazing Lucky Daye duet “Smoke” and turning out for “Party Girls,” a reggae-pop cut with Jamaican heavyweight Buju Banton. This song and the extremely fun, choreo-forward third single, “On My Mama,” are slight stylistic outliers on an album saturated in what Monét has called “elevated soul,” the glossy, Motown-inspired sound she and returning executive producer D’Mile summoned for the first installment of Jaguar. “I felt like a wannabe Quincy Jones,” Monét said of the earlier record. Writing and recording during the pandemic touring freeze, she’d imagined how she would one day present the songs onstage, “thinking about how a Bruno Mars or an Earth, Wind & Fire show would feel.” (The next year, D’Mile’s take on neoclassical R&B comfort food would reach larger audiences with his work on An Evening With Silk Sonic.)
In a sense we have Bruno Mars to thank, because he’s the reason Monét started writing hooks. In 2010, Mars landed his first vocal credit as a featured guest on rapper B.o.B’s debut single “Nothin’ on You,” a surprise No. 1 hit. The younger Monét, with several songwriting credits already to her name, regarded it as a case study for how a well-placed vocal feature could launch a solo career. She decided to specialize in writing pop hooks, promoting herself as a singer by putting her own vocals on demo tracks. Eventually she landed a B.o.B feature too. “I would try to sing them so well that they wouldn’t take me off and replace it with another artist, and sometimes it would work,” she recently explained in conversation with Earth, Wind & Fire.