When Naomi Scott was 27 she had what she refers to now as a “quarter-life crisis”. She had been working as an actor since she was a teenager, swapping bit parts in adverts for plum roles in high-profile Disney TV shows and big-budget Hollywood blockbusters including Aladdin (she played Princess Jasmine) and Elizabeth Banks’s Charlie’s Angels remake. She had also married young, after meeting her husband, ex-professional footballer Jordan Spence, at her local church in east London. Worried that the path she’d taken had its destination already mapped out, she felt frustrated, as if she hadn’t really “mourned the other versions of my life”, as the now 32-year-old puts it. Part of that process, it turned out, was returning to her first love: music.

“I felt I had to go back to basics, to a childlike writing process,” she explains, sipping a black coffee in a vast, sparsely decorated cafe in Hackney, east London, her faded red hair contrasting with the beige backdrop. “Just me on the piano at 14, allowing whatever comes naturally to come. So that’s what I did.” Music had always been in her orbit, be it via singing in a church choir or later working with the bonkers pop production house Xenomania. Somewhere along the way, however, acting had taken over.

The result of this refocus is Scott’s debut album, F.I.G. Its title, which stands for Fall Into Grace, also connects to this sense of exploration; Grace, which is Scott’s middle name, became a sort of alter ego allowing her to express “this version of yourself that you wish you had more of”. Musically, the album is a sophisticated blend of R&B, new wave and soft-focus alt-pop influenced by Peter Gabriel and 90s Janet Jackson, as well as Jessie Ware and Dev Hynes. The latter, whom Scott supported at Alexandra Palace in north London last year, adds production to the album track Cut Me Loose, helping encase a song about paranoia and self-sabotage in a silk cocoon. “Dev is my north star,” says Scott excitedly. “He’s written so many classic pop songs, but the way in which they’re presented is way more interesting.”

F.I.G was started in 2022 and worked on intermittently between LA and Norway with producer Lido (Halsey, Mariah Carey). During its creation, Scott combined singing and acting via a starring role in 2024 hit horror sequel Smile 2, playing troubled fictional pop star Skye Riley, who Scott proudly describes as a “motherfucker” who “doesn’t give a shit”. On the comeback trail after the death of her boyfriend, Riley has to contend with both drug addiction and the more immediately pressing fact she’s been cursed into seeing bloody, deeply traumatising visions. “It was the hardest thing I’ll probably have to do, but very rewarding,” Scott says of the role, with her committed performance earning her critical acclaim and a position as a new horror ”scream queen”.

Musically and visually, Riley recalls both Lady Gaga and Britney Spears, and it would be easy to assume any sidestep into music would be along similar lines to her character. Scott, however, was keen to do things on her terms. “I’ve gone through the whole process of: why do I even want to do music? What does it look like in this climate? Where do I fit in? What are the priorities for me and what does success look like to me? That’s why everything is a little bit more DIY.” The surreal video for recent single Losing You is a case in point. Looking as if it were filmed using a phone in selfie mode, it features a frenzied Scott dabbing her tears using the back of a turtle before shipping herself off to her long-distance love inside a wheelie suitcase.

“I think there are some people that want to mould me into different things,” she continues. “But I am very much girl-in-progress right now. And I wanted all the world around the album to have that feel, too. It’s not super-polished.” While she has aspirations for “larger world-building, fun experiences that include a show and choreography” in the future, she’s aware there’s work to do. “It takes honing your sound, it takes finding the right collaborators, it takes experience,” she adds, before taking a somewhat circular route back to the topic at hand (she’ll apologise for this compulsion throughout our interview). “I can’t just come in the side door and be this [fully fledged pop star], because there’s no substance underneath it.”

Having worked in Hollywood for more than a decade and seen up close the pressure of the spotlight, Scott is also not terribly keen on being Gaga-level famous. “I think fame is one of the worst things for us as human beings,” she says over a shared slice of banana bread. “The way that we so easily talk about famous people, talk about people as if we know them, as if we know anything about them, creating narratives around them and just completely dehumanising them.” She puts her fork down, sits up straight and grows serious. “Imagine you had a camera on you. So now you’re consciously thinking about yourself. And then you hear that everyone was saying stuff about how you were acting, so maybe now you’re doing less. But then they’re like: ‘Oh she’s changed.’ You absolutely cannot win, you know?”

Scott credits her parents with helping her keep her feet on the ground as her career inched towards celebrity. Both her mum and dad still work for the local church, but “there weren’t these weird expectations on me, which I think a lot of other pastors’ kids have had experiences of”. Her early idols were Christian pop stars such as Stacie Orrico (“a girl of faith, but hot still”, she smiles) and Rachael Lampa, though she remembers a particular moment with Britney and her more grownup, 2001 self-titled third album. “I begged my mum: ‘Please buy me the CD, please buy me the CD,’” she laughs, “and then fast-forward to me putting it on and I’m a Slave 4 U suddenly blaring out. My mum was just like: ‘Oh, my gosh.’”

However, it was an Alicia Keys song, her ballad If I Ain’t Got You, that proved important in Scott’s career trajectory after she performed it during Sunday service. In the congregation was former Eternal star Kéllé Bryan, who immediately saw something in the teenage Scott and signed her to her theatre agency. From there Scott was cast in adverts for Coca-Cola and Nintendo Wii, while another audition put her in front of Xenomania’s Brian Higgins and Miranda Cooper, who’d created hits for Girls Aloud and Sugababes. Scott would often commute to their country pile in Kent to hone her songwriting skills, which came in useful in later years during various songwriting camps in LA. “I learned so much, but I was definitely coming out with this pseudo-experience because the song could be for her, or her, or her …” she says of those singer-songwriter-for-hire camps.

While music was something that was just always there, Scott says she fell into acting almost by accident. After landing a role in Disney show Life Bites at 15, she was then cast in the channel’s TV movie musical Lemonade Mouth, alongside Bridgit Mendler. A role as the Pink Ranger in 2017’s big-budget Power Rangers film put her on Hollywood’s radar, a move cemented after she was cast by Guy Ritchie as Princess Jasmine in Aladdin. The announcement caused controversy, with some seeing the casting – Scott is of mixed British and Gujarati Indian descent – as evidence of Hollywood conflating south Asian and Middle Eastern people. Scott says the backlash was over quite quickly. “Once I started filming, and once the movie came out, it never really appeared in my [world],” she says. “I’m sure people talk about it and feel whatever they want to feel.”

Despite Aladdin’s commercial success – it grossed more than $1bn and was the ninth biggest film of 2019 – Scott says her life didn’t really change. Fame, thankfully, was kept at bay. “I’m so lucky because the people that come up to me are brown girls from the age of 15 to 30. I have the nicest demographic of people. We just chat and it’s the loveliest.” She says most people want to talk about Lemonade Mouth or Smile 2. “Not even because of Jasmine.”

Her propensity to star in films that also involve singing means her Spotify artist page is a mess, her most-played songs ranging from Jasmine’s A Whole New World to Skye Riley’s New Brain and various powerpop songs from Lemonade Mouth. “We need to talk to them about that,” Scott laughs. “Get that jumbled up a little bit. Because that’s not me.” Who that “me” is will be outlined on F.I.G, and the music that will follow. Having been working on figuring it all out for the last five years, Scott is getting closer to the answer.

“This is mine,” she says of the album. “When you’re acting, you really are like a colour in a painting that’s being utilised, whether that’s by the film-maker or the editor. And with music, you are the artist yourself. You are the painter.”

F.I.G is out on 20 March on Alter Music.