''For All We Know'' is the debut studio album by British

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singer-songwriter Nao. It was released on 29 July 2016 by

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and Little Tokyo Recordings. It has guest features by Abhi//Dijon and A. K. Paul, and received critical acclaim upon release.

Recording and production

The concept for the album came about when Nao began to feature vocals with other artists, such as

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and

Mura Masa Alexander Crossan (born 5 April 1996), also known by the stage name Mura Masa, is a Guernsey-born electronic music producer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. Crossan is best known for his song " Lovesick", which reached number one on the ...

. After the collaboration that she did with Disclosure on their song "Superego", it inspired Nao to work further and deeper into that genre of music. She wanted to make an album which was to bring her to fame and, after the collaborations, wanted her fans to have something to look forward to. The album title, ''For All We Know'' was named so after the 1934 jazz song of the same name, as a reference to the artist's background in the genre. She also opened up about the album title in a

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trilogy she created to tell her fans about the background of creating the album. She said, "So, for me, that kind of just sums up everything for me. It's just such a lovely message ''So love me, love me tonight/tomorrow was made for some/tomorrow may never come/for all we know''. I just thought that was so beautiful because it just says that tomorrow is not guaranteed so anything that we want to do, we have to make it happen today and I think that just kind of sums up this journey for me". In an interview with '' Billboard'', Nao advanced that the album was "a definite nod" to

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and an attempt at transposing it to actuality. Part of the production from the album was worked on with British DJ and electronic and R&B musician GRADES. Two of the other albums' producers such as Loxe and

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added a funk touch. Nao's music and voice were compared to musicians

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and

Kelela Kelela Mizanekristos ( am, ከለላ ሚዛነክርስቶስ; born June 3, 1983) is an American singer. She made her debut in the music industry with the release of her 2013 mixtape ''Cut 4 Me.'' In 2015, she released ''Hallucinogen'', an EP ...

Critical reception

Upon release, the album received critical acclaim.

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, which assigns a

weighted average The weighted arithmetic mean is similar to an ordinary arithmetic mean (the most common type of average), except that instead of each of the data points contributing equally to the final average, some data points contribute more than others. The ...

score out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, ''For All We Know'' received an average score of 82 out of 100, based on 14 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". Writing for '' Exclaim!'', Michael J. Warren hailed the album as "a dynamic listen from start to finish". It was also reported in a number of articles that the record and the style of music that was presented on the record could have been highly influenced on the early work of American musician

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Accolades

Track listing

Notes * signifies an additional producer * signifies a remixer

Charts

References

External links

* {{Authority control 2016 debut albums Albums produced by Grades Nao (singer) albums RCA Records albums