VEDO spent Friday (Oct 23) doing the thing he has done more reliably than almost anybody in his lane of R&B, which is dropping another album. V, a 15-track set released through New Wav Music Group, is billed as his tenth studio album. It pulls up with Sevyn Streeter on "Yes" and Bronx rapper Lady London on "Put Up."

The sequencing tells you exactly what kind of night this is. "Calling My Name" opens the record and "Yes" sits in the sixth slot. The back half stacks "Sex on the Ceiling," "Put Up" and "At This Hour" before "Lost Without You" and "Save Her 4 Me" walk it home. Ten of the fifteen songs carry an explicit tag, and the closer is a TNK The Monstah and RO production called "Private Show," so nobody should be queuing this up for Sunday brunch.

Behind the boards, VEDO brought in Troy Taylor, Sean Momberger, The Breed and Arsenio Archer, according to the album's release announcement. Their combined credits run through Trey Songz, Doja Cat, Chris Brown, Drake and Summer Walker. That is a lot of radio pedigree to point at a singer who has never pretended to be anything other than a grown-folks romantic.

Three songs did the advance scouting. "Save Her 4 Me," "Put Up" and "Wassup (Ouu Girl)" all rolled out ahead of the full project. A healthy share of the fan base walked into Friday already knowing the hook to the Lady London record.

Streeter makes sense as a duet partner well before anybody presses play. She spent years writing songs for other artists before her debut, Girl Disrupted, reached shelves through Atlantic on July 7, 2017, her 31st birthday, after a release date that slipped more than once. VEDO has lived a version of that double life too, writing behind the scenes while building his own catalog. "Yes" pairs two singers who learned the craft partly by handing songs to someone else.

Lady London, born Zaire Stewart in the Bronx, brings a different temperature entirely. She built her name on freestyles and a boss-lady persona, and her first full-length solo project, Lady Like: The Boss Tape, landed in January 2022 with thirteen tracks, most of them freestyles. Booking a rapper with that kind of bravado for a song titled "Put Up" is casting that explains itself before the first bar.

The road to V starts on network television. VEDO, born Wilbart McCoy III, competed on Season 4 of NBC's The Voice as a member of Team Usher. His press materials still list Usher and Chris Brown among the artists whose music he has written for, the same pair who stretched The R&B Tour to 59 stadium dates this year.

Before the breakout, he did the unglamorous work. His 2015 album 93 came first, followed by the 2016 State of Mind EP and the 2017 full-length From Now On. A self-titled album arrived in 2019, and its "Let's Get Married" became a reliable streaming record for a singer still waiting on his moment.

The singing competition opened the door, but a phone screen is what kicked it in. "You Got It," from his 2020 album For You, caught fire on TikTok and piled up hundreds of millions of streams. It eventually went double-platinum, turning a reality-show alum into an artist with a genuine signature record.

Plenty of singers would have spent the next five years chasing that moment. VEDO kept the pipeline moving instead, landing 1320 in 2021 with Eric Bellinger, Jacquees and Ari Lennox on board. Mood Swings followed in 2023 with Chris Brown, Tink, Lloyd and Erica Banks joining Bellinger and Lennox, while 7 and e•pit•o•me kept the release calendar full through 2025.

He started singing at nine in Benton Harbor, Michigan. This weekend he has a fifteen-song album with Sevyn Streeter and Lady London on it sitting in the R&B new-release lanes. V is streaming now.