On Her Daring New Album, Camila Cabello Swings for the Fences—And Hits a Home Run (2024)

Back in March, Camila Cabello dropped “I Luv It”—and it landed on the Internet like a grenade. As the lead single from her fourth studio album, C, XOXO, it represented a radical left-turn for the former Fifth Harmony member turned slick, chart-topping Latin-pop star: Over bellowing synths and rattling electronic beats, Cabello had unleashed the most divisive song of her career, featuring a wild, half-mumbled verse from Playboi Carti and that strangely addictive chorus. (Specifically, Cabello frenetically singing “I love it” over and over…and over.) Was this hard pivot in both image and sound a truly authentic reflection of Cabello, the person? Or is this the record she was always working towards, but never quite felt brave enough to make?

Very much the latter, it turns out. “I feel like everything in my life and my work led up to me being capable of making this album,” Cabello says from Morocco, where she would perform the following evening ahead of the album’s release on Friday. (“I would join video, but I look crazy right now,” she says in her warm, raspy voice, before letting out a long laugh.) “I feel like I came close to certain aspects of it before—all the way back to different parts of unreleased songs from when I was 16 and using GarageBand,” she continues, before adding, after a knowing pause: “It just took a while to get here.”

In some senses, “I Luv It” is a neat introduction to Cabello’s new era, which is bold, brash, and often pretty bonkers. (It also marked her first single since changing record labels.) But it represents just one part of the full spectrum of sounds Cabello explores across the album’s 14 tracks, which swerve breathlessly from reggaeton to ambient alt-pop to dance bangers. Taking cues from the unconventional structures of records like Frank Ocean’s Blonde and Rosalía’s Motomami, this pick-and-mix approach to genre and format is, at first, fairly bracing. (There are even three songs that almost entirely hand over the reins to other artists—namely Drake, bedroom-pop sensation PinkPantheress, and upstart Floridian rapper BLP Kosher.) But C, XOXO rewards repeat listening. Let it marinate, and what starts as a chaotic collage of sonic styles slowly comes into focus, offering a window into Cabello’s wilder side and a playful paean to Miami, where she grew up after moving with her family from Cuba at the age of six.

For Cabello, the key to unlocking the album’s ferocious energy arrived when writing the album’s second track, “Chanel No. 5,” which sees her flex (“Magic and real like Murakami / Red chipped nails, I’m wabi-sabi”) over a wonky sample of an out-of-tune piano. “When I wrote that song, I was just like, ‘Whoa,’” she remembers, describing it as a kind of eureka moment. “It felt like I was tapping into a side of myself I hadn’t before, and just channeling this new character.” How closely is that C, XOXO character related to the real Camila? “It’s a kind of heightened version of me,” she says. “It’s when I’m going into a meeting, or before I do a show, and me and my dancers listen to very hype music, rap music—anything that makes us feel co*cky and confident. I’ve always listened to other artists for that feeling. And it’s really cool that I’ve been able to get to a place where I feel like I can generate it authentically in myself without it feeling forced.”

Now 27, Cabello has spent over half of her life in the public eye. She charts that journey on the album, which is as candid about her anxiety spirals as it is those moments of fierce self-belief. “I feel like anybody who doesn’t feel sh*tty all the time probably works really hard to not feel sh*tty,” she says. “Maybe that’s not true for everyone actually, but I feel like that’s been the case for me.” Besides therapy, Cabello cites taking a year off from touring as an important factor in the personal growth that led to the album; it gave her the time to immerse herself in music and films and books and reestablish a proper social life. (When I ask if there was anything specific that excited her, she mentions she’s been working her way through Letterboxd lists via a secret account, and reels off an eclectic lineup of authors she’s been diving into that includes Joan Didion, Ann Patchett, and Franz Kafka.)

It was also this period of exploration—spent putting together mood boards that included images from Harmony Korine movies, browsing the racks at Dover Street Market, dyeing her hair platinum blonde—that encouraged her to go bolder with her fashion this time around. “I just let my curiosity lead me a bit,” she says, laughing. “The only bad thing is now I’m addicted to changing my hair. I’m like, What can I do next? When can I do it?” Given the relentless pace of her career—since auditioning for The X Factor at the age of 14, she’s been working in the endless cycle of recording and releasing, promoting and performing—that downtime felt like a precious rarity, and is something she’s now adamant about protecting moving forward. “Touring all the time, you grow as a performer, you grow in your craft, but it can stunt you as a human being,” she says.

The time away also led Cabello to home in on her relationship to Miami across the record, whether nodding to its darker, seamier underbelly on “B.O.T.A.” (which features a brilliantly barmy—and strangely haunting—interpolation of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service”), or describing the hedonistic thrill of a South Beach night out on “Dade County Dreaming,” which sees her join forces with JT and Yung Miami, formerly of City Girls. (“Party in the city that raised us / Party like I forgot I was famous / Party on him like I’m nameless,” Cabello growls over a sultry, rippling synth line.) Cabello recorded much of the album there, rather than in her usual base of Los Angeles, and when the city began to work its way into the lyrics and sound organically, she crystallized its influence into something more intentional. “I wanted to challenge myself to make songs that were not about a romantic interest—that were about a place, or about my friends, or about a night out,” she explains.

The record also arrives at an interesting moment, when it feels like the tides of pop are turning away from confessional singer-songwriter fodder wrapped in layers of metaphor, and towards something more forthright and club-ready, in part thanks to the online dominance of Charli XCX’s Brat over the past few weeks. When Cabello dropped “I Luv It,” it was instantly compared to Charli’s strain of experimental pop, but as Cabello points out—and listening to the record in full confirms—C, XOXO may be an exercise in contrasts, but “I Luv It” is something of a red herring. Cabello’s album takes its cues less from hyperpop, and more from a broad melting pot of 2000s hip-hop, with its clattering beats and the furious pace of her vocal delivery. No hard feelings about the comparisons, though: Cabello and Charli are friends, having supported Taylor Swift on her Reputation tour together, and Charli co-wrote one of Cabello’s biggest chart smashes, “Senorita,” which she performed with her former partner Shawn Mendes. “I listened to ‘365’ about 10 times in a row on the day it came out,” Cabello says enthusiastically of Brat’s closer. “I think it’s so interesting the way she’s brought this vulnerability to these club bangers—it’s such a sick juxtaposition, lyrically and sonically.”

And despite the fact that C, XOXO has been marketed as a party record—and it does have plenty of moments that will go off in the club—it’s also leavened with more mature moments, audible in the tales of romantic struggle charted on the folksy “Twentysomethings,” or the odes to female friendship found on the reggaeton-infused “Dream-Girls.” “I definitely think that getting older is underrated,” says Cabello. “I feel calmer, I feel less anxious. I think it’s because I’m learning. I work really, really hard at feeling better and feeling good. And for me, what manifests in the end result and the outcome of that is a project like C, XOXO. But on the input side of that is tons of therapy and podcasts and working out and making sure that I’m surrounded by people who make me feel loved and make me feel worthy of love and celebration.”

Some of those people had a direct hand in the record. Unlike Cabello’s previous albums, which featured a litany of co-writers and producers, C, XOXO is almost entirely the product of her work with just two collaborators: alt-pop maestro El Guincho, whom Cabello admired for his work with FKA twigs and Rosalía (he produced the bulk of the latter’s masterful Motomami), and producer Jasper Harris. “My favorite producers are the people who pick the weird sounds or go for the things nobody gets at first, and aren’t just going for what sounds safe,” says Cabello. “I love the risk-takers.” Between them, they fostered an environment in the studio where Cabello could take big swings, bringing out a new sense of confidence in the stranger places her songwriting instincts might take her. “They both really poured their hearts into this project too,” she adds. “I think we all feel like it’s our baby, in different ways.”

The word Cabello returns to when discussing the project is weird, and C, XOXO certainly is that. But between its more outré moments, it is also a reminder of Cabello’s formidable talents as a songwriter—and, more specifically, her ear for an irresistibly catchy melody. (Trust me: You won’t be able to get her Lil Nas X collab “He Knows” or the dancehall-inflected “Hot Uptown” with Drake out of your head.) By the time the album’s fantastic penultimate track “Pretty When I Cry” comes around—a tale of heartbreak and late-night dancefloor euphoria, with a loopy, Tove Lo-esque chorus—she’ll have you wrapped around her finger, cracked red manicure and all. “I just feel so proud of it,” says Cabello, firmly. “I feel so proud of the work—and it’s exciting to feel that it might get the love that I feel for it.”

She’ll have plenty of opportunities to feel that love as she heads out on tour, first stopping at Glastonbury, where she’ll be performing the day after the album drops. Where better to celebrate than that? “Although I can’t really drink until then, because my voice gets shot when I drink,” she says, laughing again. “So right after Glastonbury, I’m going to drink for sure, maybe have a burger, and then I want to sleep for literally 22 hours. That would be my best present to myself: sleeping for 22 hours with my dogs cuddling with me. Which is the least C, XOXO answer I could have ever given you, but that’s the truth.” If there’s one thing that C, XOXO proves, though, it’s that there’s more to Cabello than you might have thought.