Victoria Monét stretches the love song to 22 tracks

Victoria Monét's second album runs 22 tracks, and the title says what she is betting on: Frequency Of Love, one signal held steady across more than an hour of R&B, out on Lovett Music/RCA. The runtime is the first thing you notice. By the end you have stopped counting.

Monét spent years writing for other people while building her own catalogue. Born in Atlanta, moved to Sacramento as a teenager, she co-wrote songs on every Ariana Grande album from Yours Truly to Positions and picked up three Grammy nominations for her work on Thank U, Next before she had a hit under her own name. The Jaguar EP in 2020 moved the emphasis. Jaguar II in 2023 moved the scale: "On My Mama" reached the top 40 of the Hot 100, and at the 66th Grammys she took Best New Artist, Best R&B Album and Best Engineered Album, Non-Classical from seven nominations. Frequency Of Love is what she does with that leverage, and the confidence shows in the running order before it shows in any single chorus.

The record was co-executive produced by Monét and Camper, with further production from D'Mile, Kaytranada, Aver Ray, Michaël Brun and Cashmere Brown. SZA, Bruno Mars, Leon Thomas, Bryson Tiller, Lucky Daye, Chlöe and Hazel Monét all turn up somewhere on it. "Reach Out" led the campaign, the sunlit one, and it sits deep in the sequence rather than at the front.

R&B is the frame and the record fills it: slow love songs with syrup in the writing, funk figures that come back around as reprises, a few up-tempos with an Afro-house pulse underneath, all of it finished with a modern sheen over references that reach back through the 1990s. The stakes are small and constant. Wanting someone, keeping them, losing them, saying so plainly. This is a set of love notes, and the record is better for staying that size.

The sequencing does real work. "All I Need" opens and "Come Back To You" answers it straight away, the two shortest songs here stating the album's whole problem and then getting out of the way. Side two is built better: "Juicy" opens it, "Money" interrupts, "You Hurt Me Too" closes it, which is the album's argument in miniature, pleasure first and damage after. "Head To Toe" ends the first side as the first song allowed to take its time. "Let Me", the longest cut on the record, sits near the end where a slow one is earned. "Reach Out" arrives late enough to land as a reward instead of a trailer.

It is for the people who played Jaguar II through and wanted more of the writing, and for anyone with SZA, Chlöe and Lucky Daye in rotation. Play it twice if you like love songs that take their time. Skip it if a 22-track album already reads as a warning.

The interludes are the tax. There are four of them in the sequence and they do the job of a mood board, including "Dark Side Of The Moon", which runs 37 seconds and would be better as the front of something. A tighter edit would have made the best songs hit harder, and at this length she can afford the cut. Nothing else here is filler, which is the harder trick at this scale.

Frequency Of Love is a four: a long record that knows which of its songs are carrying the weight, made by a singer who no longer needs anyone else's chorus to prove the point. The frequency holds for the whole hour.

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