Nao made four albums with RCA, and each one carried the name of her own company, Little Tokyo Recordings. On Wednesday (Sept 30) she announced that her fifth album will carry only her company's name. Autumn, a 10-track record made with producer Dave Okumu, is due Friday, October 16, with no major label attached. She previewed it the same day with a double single, "Eugene" and "Save The World."

The East London singer, born Neo Joshua, is framing the album as the first of four season-themed records under the title A Soulful Suite, each one built around a genre that shaped her. Autumn is the jazz chapter. It sends her back to the four years she spent studying vocal jazz at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. That training ran through Charlie Parker, John Coltrane, Keith Jarrett, Ella Fitzgerald and Sarah Vaughan, years before she sang backup for Kwabs and Jarvis Cocker.

"I had this realisation that I'm performing in old skin, but I'm a new person now," Nao said in the album announcement. "I found myself thinking a lot about the kind of musician and performer I want to be."

A lot has happened to the performer she's describing since RCA released For All We Know on July 29, 2016. Saturn followed in October 2018 and picked up a Mercury Prize nomination for Album of the Year in 2019, then a nomination for Best Urban Contemporary Album at the 62nd Grammy Awards in 2020. She gave birth to her daughter that June and released And Then Life Was Beautiful in September 2021. Jupiter arrived on February 21, 2025, an 11-song set whose credits read "Little Tokyo Recordings Limited under exclusive licence to Sony Music Entertainment UK Limited."

That licence to Sony is the part of the arrangement that is now gone. Nao hasn't said publicly why the RCA run ended or what happens to the four albums it produced. The announcement presents the split as a creative decision, calling the independent release a deliberately pared-back move that reconnects her with the freedom of her earliest EPs. The rollout is built the same way, with two songs released together on Sept 30 and the full album following 16 days later, instead of a run of advance singles spread across a season.

Okumu fronted the Invisible, whose 2009 debut was nominated for the Mercury Prize, and he co-wrote and produced Jessie Ware's Devotion, which drew its own Mercury nomination in 2012. In 2023 he released I Came from Love under the name Dave Okumu and the Seven Generations. The two new singles were built around live musicianship and improvisation, which the release notes describe as a freer, more instinctive way for her to make music.

"Eugene" is named for the middle name of D'Angelo, born Michael Eugene Archer, who died on October 14, 2025, at 51. Nao wrote it as a tribute that runs his influence through her own songwriting and phrasing rather than imitating his sound. "Save The World" takes its cue from Marvin Gaye's socially conscious records and asks where one person's responsibility sits in an increasingly overwhelming world.

"Jazz feels like letting go to me," she said. "That's what improvisation is, it's free-form, it's letting loose, it's shedding, it's a release. Autumn and jazz melt together really beautifully."

Her route out differs from the one Megan Thee Stallion took in August, when she kept her masters and publishing and signed a distribution deal with Interscope instead of leaving the major system. Running a release without a major's budget carries real cost. Money is what ended No Guidnce, the London R&B quartet that broke up in September because it could no longer afford to put out music it had already finished. The three remaining albums in A Soulful Suite do not yet have genres or release dates attached.