Victoria Monét taps into the holiday spirit with ‘JAGUAR II CHRISTMAS’ album
BY Angelina Velasquez / 12.7.2024
Victoria Monét is unleashing another project for fans to cozy up to this holiday season. On Saturday (Dec. 7), she announced the Dec. 11 release of JAGUAR II CHRISTMAS: THE ORCHESTRAL ARRANGEMENTS. The track list includes “Moment,” “Big Boss,” “Dive,” “We Might Even Be Falling in Love” and “Touch Me.”
A fan commented on the artist’s Instagram post with, “Best Christmas gift, ever!” A second supporter said, “Now Ms. Monet! I can't take all of this being thrown at me.” The compilation comes just three months after she rolled out JAGUAR II, the follow-up to her wildly successful and praised 2020 EP JAGUAR. The sophomore effort includes the platinum single “On My Mama.”
The body of work cemented her name in history at the 66th annual Grammy Awards ceremony in February when she won Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical, a first for a Black woman and only the fourth woman in the Recording Academy’s history. She also earned golden gramophones for Best Album of the Year and Best New Artist. Since earning the coveted hardware, her career has been changing for the better.
In March she told The Hollywood Reporter, “To be honest, people are treating me a little bit different. I’m not going to lie. There’s been some change in energy, which is cool. I’m going to take it, but for the most part, I’m just really trying to focus, keep my head down, keep working and take advantage of all the opportunities that are coming now.” Among those opportunities is recording “SOS (Sex on Sight)” with Usher.
While working on JAGUAR II, she revealed she had been in a Confessions "rabbit hole" when she got a call about working with the crooner. When they met up, “he starts trying this melody, which ends up being the second verse, his verse of the song,” she told Rolling Stone about their studio session. “[He] comes out and we start writing lyrics to it together. It just felt like … serendipitous! It was very serendipitous. It just fell together into our laps on a magical day in the studio." She also paid tribute to him with her and Teyana Taylor’s “Bad Girl” linkup at the 2024 BET Awards.