When Tiana Major9 walked into NPR's Washington office in March to play the Tiny Desk in person, she lit incense and introduced the band by singing each musician's name. She handed the closing song to trumpeter Keyon Harrold, who had let her sing at his own Desk two years earlier. Almost the entire set came from an album that had been in the world for barely a month.

That album is November Scorpio, released February 13 on the independent +1 Records, and it is the first full-length of her career. She has been a Grammy nominee since November 2020, when "Collide," her collaboration with EARTHGANG for the Queen & Slim soundtrack, was placed in the Best R&B Song category for the following spring's ceremony. Six years separated that single from the debut it was supposed to launch.

On August 28 the label pushed the record out again as a fifteen-track deluxe edition running forty-eight minutes, with "MORE" slotted in at three, "Who?" at seven, "alright!" at eight, and "Heaven" at twelve. Two of those four additions rank among the best songs on the album.

Tiana Thomas-Ambersley grew up in a Jamaican household in the London Borough of Newham, where she sang gospel in church from the age of five. Her stage name came from the major ninth chord she kept circling back to. She reached the final of MOBO's UnSung competition in 2014, put out "Merry Go," "Levee (Let It Break)" and "Mr. Mysterious" across 2017 and 2018, and opened 2019 with the self-released EP Rehearsal @ Nine.

Motown signed her later that year, and by November "Collide" was on the Queen & Slim soundtrack. The song entered Billboard's Adult R&B Songs chart that same month, held on for twenty-six weeks and peaked at No. 9. Stormzy pulled her onto "Rainfall" from Heavy Is the Head, and the Grammy nomination arrived twelve months after the single's release.

What came next was four EPs and no album. At Sixes and Sevens arrived in August 2020, Back at Sixes and Sevens that December, Major Mantras in February 2021 and a remix set that April. Fool Me Once, with Smino on "2 seater," followed in March 2022. Then she went quiet for two years.

A debut arriving six years after the breakout single carries the weight that normally falls on album two, when listeners decide whether they were attached to the artist or only to the moment. Tiana Major9 spent those six years building an audience that had never once heard her hold a full record together.

She resurfaced in the autumn of 2024 with "alone," the first single of an independent run at +1 Records, and followed it with the acoustic-leaning "money" in 2025 and "Shook One" that August. The sessions behind November Scorpio spread across London, Los Angeles and Jamaica, with PRGRSHN producing much of it alongside Brody Myles, Pera and JLL.

"Shook One" is built on Mobb Deep's "Shook Ones Pt. II," written with Kassa Alexander and produced by PRGRSHN, and it sat unused for years before it found a home. The obstacle was legal rather than creative. In Apple Music's track-by-track notes she describes the homage to the Queens duo as one where "it was really hard to figure out clearances."

Tiana Major9's writing stays close to the ordinary necessities of an adult life rather than the abstractions R&B reaches for when it wants to sound timeless. "money" treats cash as a partner who cannot be trusted to stay, "fiiighttt" catches the fatigue of two people rehearsing the same argument, and "GRACE" works as self-compassion without sliding into affirmation-poster language. Her own track notes trace "fiiighttt" to a stretch when she felt defensive and combative. The album then closes on "Lucid Dream," about the kind of dreaming she does most nights and cannot always switch off.

The original November Scorpio ran eleven songs and 37 minutes. The expanded version runs fifteen and 48, and the four new tracks were dropped into the middle of the sequence rather than stacked at the end, which reshapes the record instead of extending it. "MORE" arrives at 2:28 and now sits between "waikiki" and "money," moving the opening stretch faster than it moved in February. "alright!" lands at eight, after "Who?," and "Heaven" slides in at twelve between the Yebba duet "Always" and "desire."

Deluxe editions in R&B have mostly become a second run at a streaming week, padded with remixes and vault clearances nobody bothered to sequence twice. What separates this one is that the new songs change the running order rather than sit outside it. "MORE" and "alright!" belong in the same conversation as "waikiki," "fiiighttt" and the Mobb Deep rebuild, and the fifteen-track version still plays start to finish without a song you reach past.

What holds across both versions of the record is intention, the sense that every line has been assigned a job. The phrasing sits behind the beat and catches up on her own schedule, and the runs go where the writing needs them rather than where a vocal producer would park them. The melodies land close enough to the first guess to feel inevitable and far enough from it to stay interesting.

On "Always" she and Yebba both pull back instead of competing, two singers who favor restraint agreeing not to test each other. Keyon Harrold plays over "energy!" with the Roy Hargrove warmth she asked him for, which gives the album's most jazz-weighted track a horn line that sounds improvised rather than arranged. The live proof came quickly, since she played Atlanta, Los Angeles and New York on a short American run in March. The Tiny Desk that same month put a string section, two background vocalists and Harrold's trumpet behind ballads that had been living in a bedroom-sized mix.

American R&B rotation has been slow with British singers who do not arrive attached to a rap feature. Tiana Major9 also came back from a two-year absence on a label with no radio department behind her, which is the trade she made for the record existing at all. The Grammy nomination is five years old now, the Tiny Desk ran back in March, and the deluxe landed on a Friday in late August with no campaign built to fight for a chart week. November Scorpio (Deluxe) is out now on +1 Records: fifteen songs, forty-eight minutes, four of them new.