“Turn that beat up a little bit,” sings Naomi Sharon. “I got time tonight.” The opening lines to “Miss That,” the first single from her upcoming sophomore album No Sleep In Paradise, feel like a reintroduction. Most listeners heard the Dutch singer-songwriter’s velvety, rich voice for the first time on 2023’s Obsidian, the sultry and dynamic alternative R&B/neo-soul debut that earned her a litany of comparisons to legends like Sade and announced her as the first female signee to the label OVO Sound. Last May brought the follow-up EP The Only Love We Know, with 6 new tracks that felt in some ways like a thematic continuation of Obsidian.

“I'm on a roll with making music right now,” Sharon tells me over the phone. As introspective as her lyrics can be and as seriously as she takes her work, the singer is much lighter in conversation, cracking jokes at her own expense and speaking about her career with an assured humility. As the release date of No Sleep In Paradise approaches, she is looking back on the days leading up to the release of Obsidian and observing the patterns she’s noticed she tends to fall into. As much as nerves can build up, that pressure can generate creative momentum. “Like, all right, there I go again. I’m a little bit more stressed than usual, or I’m overthinking right now. But every time, we kind of raised the bar. It's funny, [making Obsidian], it was like, this is so good, but what are we going to do next?” she remembers. “Making No Sleep In Paradise, I felt the same thing, and now I’m [already] excited for the third album. That's where my mind goes right now.”

That harmonious creative flow wasn’t created by accident. For one, Sharon has been preparing for her destiny since her childhood. “I was always talking to my mom and dad about it, or my friends, or I was making drawings of designs that I wanted to wear, or what I wanted my stage to look like,” she says. “I definitely knew I was going to do this.” And arguably even more important than that certainty, Sharon has spent the last few years cultivating a circle of consistent collaborators, building a foundation for her to be able to create freely.

No Sleep In Paradise is executive produced by Jordan Ullman of the duo Majid Jordan, one of her longest lasting and most frequent collaborators. “When we're in a studio, we are like one brain,” she describes. “It's really rare to have that with someone and to feel that comfortable. I feel safe, and therefore, it's a good environment for music. That's really precious to me.”

It was within that cocoon that she was able to explore a wider range of sounds, oscillating from deeply intimate ballads to more uptempo and energetic tracks like “Miss That.”She describes the new music like a color palette, in which each color gets to possess its own distinct identity while blending and melding into the others. In a distinct shift from Obsidian, she says she recorded the music while imagining what each song would look like performed.

When I ask Sharon what she’s most looking forward to about the release of No Sleep In Paradise, her answer is immediate. “To tour!” she says, her smile palpable through the phone. “To have people singing your song back to you, it’s so beautiful. It’s the most beautiful compliment in the world to me.” She seems equally excited by the creative process as she does by the prospect of getting to give her audience a more immersive experience. She describes her plans for more choreography, more dancers, and more movement-friendly stage costumes. “No more latex this tour!” she laughs.

Fans have already been able to get a taste of what they might be able to expect from the tour, with the debut performance of “Miss That” alongside other songs at the Telfar store during NYFW and an electric performance at the Edison Awards in Amsterdam the same month.

Onstage, Sharon looks paradoxically more grounded when she doesn’t stay in one place, becoming all the more commanding when untethered by a mic stand. When she lets the music simply move through her body, she looks exactly how she says she felt in the process of making it: “I felt energetic. I felt free.”