Much of the excitement in mainstream pop these days falls left of center. Chappell Roan took us all to theater camp; Charli XCX painted the club green with Brat. It’s only too easy to view Camila Cabello’s recent reboot as the work of a music establishment clumsily shifting gears to follow in their wake. The outsized response sparked by C,XOXO’s lead single “I Luv It” was split between excitement over a radical new musical direction and eye-rolling over what initially seemed like one of the most cynical pop rebrands in recent memory (at least until we figure out what is going on with Katy Perry).
It’s too bad, because if there was ever an artist more primed for casting off an old self and giving into some effortless partying, Cabello would be the woman. Until now, her music has been incredibly dutiful, whether owing to the demands of a career in Fifth Harmony or the loving reverence for her musical heritage that shaped her three prior solo albums. Though it bears her signature, C,XOXO is a transitional record mistakenly labeled as a statement album. It’s a bridge away from girl-group polish and Latin-inflected pop and toward a more dreamy and reckless club sound. It is not a full pivot to hyperpop, as “I Luv It” suggested, but more like a stab at the wistful, complex, dancefloor introversion practiced by the likes of Lorde, Kelela, Troye Sivan, Frank Ocean, and Rosalía. It’s an evolution that squares nicely with Cabello’s stated ambition to be thought of not simply as a performer but as a writer, the author of a more complex and explicitly adult narrative than she’s told before.
C,XOXO is a broadly sketched tale of returning home to Miami and gaining perspective on broken love and aimless youth. It’s heavy on vibes, evoking the 305 primarily through features, some voice memos, and a toothless Spring Breakers aesthetic that’s notably neither trashy nor violent. Yet the musical landscape that Cabello’s producers El Guincho and Jasper Harris conjure is incredibly vivid, wielding warm synths and babbling samples as slinky launch pads for scorching riffs on Afrobeat and reggaeton. Halfway through the fantastic “Dade County Dreaming”—which doubles as a likely swan song for City Girls—JT’s ass-shaking chant is gradually subsumed by an absolutely tidal piano churn as their swagger gives way to a dreamy instrumental vastness. It’s as if Cabello is accessing a new mental horizon in real time.
What horizon is that? If the production has personality to spare, the same cannot always be said of the persona Cabello adopts here. This Camila often feels clumsy, half-drawn, at odds with the assuredness of the music. Even as she professes on “Chanel No. 5” to being “a cute girl with a sick mind,” much of the record bears little evidence of perverse or spontaneous thought. Cabello’s lyrics can be so associative they’re nonsensical. Daisy-chained signifiers like “Cigarette, candy necklace on my hips, butterfly that’s on my wrist” add up to little beyond PG-13 edginess.
C,XOXO does powerfully evoke the kind of album Cabello aspires to: A MOTOMAMI, Blonde, or Something to Give Each Other, the kind of record that reveals itself through collage, expertly weaving in loose strands that telegraph the artist’s taste and sensibility. Apart from a few wonderfully insane moments like the Gucci Mane sample on “I Luv It” or the downcast Pitbull rework of “B.O.A.T.,” Cabello’s choices more often feel either random or convenient. When she gives an unexpected shout-out to Haruki Murakami on “Chanel No. 5,” it feels like posturing. It doesn’t help that it’s made to slot into such a basic, and vaguely orientalist, rhyme scheme: “Fold for me like origami/Magic and real like Murakami/Red chipped nails, I’m wabi-sabi.”
Her features are a mixed bag in the same way. Her sultry, steely-eyed vocals on “Dade County Dreaming” make for a cool compliment to JT and Yung Miami’s staccato flows; her voice maps sweetly onto PinkPantheress’ effervescent production on the too-short “pink xoxo.” But there’s little chemistry with Playboi Carti, who’s left muttering to himself on the frenetic, overblown “I Luv It,” and Cabello’s coyness is mismatched against Lil Nas X’s full-throated horniness on “He Knows.” That her Drake duet, “Hot Uptown,” arrives on the back of his bruising defeat to Kendrick Lamar is a miracle of bad timing, because it’s excellent: a should-be hit that plays brilliantly to their respective strengths as a songwriter and a fuckboy.
Cabello is so eager to go searching for new sounds you occasionally wonder if she ought to be crediting other artists for the raw material she’s working with. Even though she’s decidedly Lana-endorsed, “June Gloom” cribs a little too much from the singer’s laconic flow for comfort; ditto Amaarae on “He Knows,” which fits a little too neatly into her sweaty, eclectic vision of Afrobeat. It still feels almost psychedelic how in-your-face the Charli XCX rip is on “I Luv It,” especially in light of the album’s title.
Cabello has the juice to be her own artist and is more than capable as a writer, but the risks she takes are inherently safe when they’ve all been taken before. Her best songs on C,XOXO capture an acute emotional drift with a compelling honesty. “B.O.A.T.” is gorgeous, a song that pines for the final word in a breakup that she’ll never get to utter. Cabello tracks her roiling emotions in real time as her voice leaps from Auto-Tuned lament to piercing anger, while a subtle sample of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room” needles its way through, half-mocking, half-longing. It’s sad, sophisticated, and utterly singular—a proof of concept in a room full of prototypes.
