Marsha Ambrosius Discovers Herself On ‘Sensual, Seductive’ Solo Album

Floetry’s singing half Marsha Ambrosius is set to release her solo debut, Late Nights & Early Mornings, at the end of June. A lead single is expected to drop in mid April, and the album features production from Just Blaze, Dre & Vidal, but Ambrosius produced the majority of the disc herself.

With the break-up of Floetry now behind her, Ambrosius described the project as a journey in self-discovery.

“This is like an adventure to me. I got to discover who I am as an artist and what I want versus what people expect of me,” Ambrosius told VIBE. “It was like, what do I really have to say and what do I really mean? There’s no room for error. The journey of defining who I am has been joyous. Oh my goodness, I’m a grown woman now! I thought I was a grown woman when I got out here at 22. I’m about to be 33 in August. I’m like 10 years ago I thought I knew everything. 10 years later I say I knew nothing. So I ran with that confidence.”

To tide fans over until the album’s release, Marsha offered the mixtape, Yours Sincerely, in February. Much like her past material, the full album will be, as a friend told her, more for the honeymoon than the wedding.

“The vibe of the album [is] sensual, it’s sincere, it’s seductive. It’s an angle that I’ve always pushed as a singer anyway,” she said. “Not too many women get the opportunity to say what they want, and having controlled and written pretty much everything I get to do all of that on one album. J Records they understood me as an artist and said, ‘what do you want? How do you want to sound? What do you feel like your album should be’ and they allowed me to go in the studio.”

Previously signed to Dr. Dre’s Aftermath/Interscope imprint, the U.K. singer joined J last year. She's offered her soulful vocals to artists like The Game (“Why You Hate the Game”), Nas (“Hustlers”) and Styles P (“I’m Black”).

While any of those artists could appear on Late Nights, Ambrosius said the cameo list is a surprise for now. But two songs to look out for are the intro, “Yours Sincerely,” and the ode to emancipation, “THE Breakup,” about a former beau.

“You have the breakup song but this is thee breakup song. We were dating, he was cool, we were cool, but we were both in two different places and he wanted something more than I did and I just had to be honest,” she explained. “As a woman sometimes you try to play the ‘No everything is okay’ and roll with the punches. I was at my breaking point and I called like, ‘Look, I need space.’ [On this song,] I really sang my whole conversation I had with this person. So it doesn’t even feel like a song to me. It was definitely my favorite executed conversation piece that I ever did.” —Clover Hope