I’ll be 30-years-old in just over 24 hours and I can’t explain to you exactly how I feel.
All I know for certain is that NAO’s new album Saturn is the best thing that could happen to me now that the time is running towards 30 years.

The British singer and songwriter, who debuted in 2016 with For All We Know, dropped her second album last Friday. It’s titled Saturn, just like the Greek God of Fertility and Time.

Saturn is also the planet that takes 29 years to return, introducing us into a new phase of our life: every 29 years, Saturn returns to the sign it was in when you were born, a cycle called The Saturn Return, during which you will come face to face with your life. 

That’s the reason why NAO, the early 30s, has titled her new album Saturn: 

My friends kept telling me about the term ‘Saturn Returns’. It’s this idea that Saturn takes 29 years to orbit from when you’re born and it is the planet of blessings and growth.
So by the time you’re around 29, between 27 and 32, something big happens in your life. It’s like waking up and coming of age.

The 13 tracks take you on a journey through her personal changes, telling you about when, after a crisis, nothing remains the same: bloodshed is unavoidable but necessary and only time can heal the heart.

NAO started writing a personal diary and then she continued therapy by working on a new beautiful, honest and fragile album.

Contrary to what you might think, Saturn is not a gloomy, sad or nihilistic record: NAO was able to tell such a profound moment with an extraordinary lightness.
The songs are filled with funky-jazz (Love Supreme), velvety R & B (Make It Out Alive feat. SiR) and Afrobeat rhythms (If You Ever) that lead you in orbit with her and Saturn within seconds. 

I orbit around the way that you are
Can’t help but be drawn because you’re a star
Baby, baby, baby, baby
Won’t you please navigate to me, to me?

I love the way you open my heart
I feel you around me like Venus and Mars

[…]
Eventually you will proceed to give me what I need
Oh, w-w-w-w-woah
And that’s how it should be
You leave and return
You’re just like Saturn to me, to me

NAO drew her Milky Way, picking up the pieces and the mistakes like they were constellation: she also learned how to walk among them with the same confidence of an astronaut.
It is no coincidence that NAO has chosen to open the record with a song like Another Lifetime which has one of the most trivial as well as undisputed truths:

Everybody makes mistakes
Do we live and learn to brave them?

Saturn is a cosmic album, full of energy, awareness, and answers that lay the foundations for NAO’s next steps. In music, as in life.

As for me, I’ll be 30-years-old in less than 24 hours and, despite my certainties, I still can’t explain to you exactly how I feel.
I’ll doubtless go buy some white balloon, waiting for my Saturn Return.