What happened to Camila Cabello?

When the hook, “Havana, ooh na na” flooded the radio in 2018, it was clear that Camila Cabello’s days in the spotlight were not over. Two years after leaving Fifth Harmony, her voice was everywhere, partnered with Young Thug’s, as she told the tale of a love that started in the Cuban city.

Cabello got an even bigger hit a year later. “Senorita” with Shawn Mendes was the start of a public relationship that remains one of the only reasons why Cabello hasn’t faced the unfortunate fate of completely waning from the public eye.

I’ve been a fan of Cabello’s since I saw her open Taylor Swift’s Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018. She’s made some of my all-time favorite albums. But last month, Cabello released her fourth studio album, titled C,XOXO. Unfortunately, you have a lower chance of having heard about that than about how Mendes and Cabello were spotted at a game together recently. 

The single cover for "Havana (feat. Young Thug)"

However, I listened, and there were two surprises about this album. Firstly, the decline in what is considered a hit. “Havana” and “Senorita” both have over two billion Spotify streams, and “Bam Bam” (the big hit of Familia) almost one billion. “Don’t Go Yet” (Familia’s lead) has 500 million and quintuples the biggest C,XOXO hit, “I LUV IT (feat. Playboi Carti)”. The second surprise was that there was nothing noteworthy enough about C,XOXO for me to write the full-length album review I’d planned.

Instead, here are some recommendations from Cabello’s earlier discography, with the little review I can give of C,XOXO at the end.

“Never Be the Same”, from Camila, is an anthem about an electric love story. Believe me when I say that it’s amazing in concert. “Something’s Gotta Give” and “Consequences” are some of Cabello’s best ballads. Paradoxes in, “Your November rain could set the night on fire… but we could only burn so long” and wordplay like, “Know you’re lying when you’re lying next to me” comprise some of Cabello’s most clever lines. “Consequences” goes from reminiscing happily on a romance (calling it, “young and wild and free”) to regretting it (calling it, “dumb, dark and cheap”). “In the Dark” features Cabello trying to help someone else through their loneliness by embracing their insecurities. The chorus line, “Who are you when it’s 3 am and you’re all alone and LA doesn’t feel like home?” will undoubtedly get you dancing. “Into It”, the sensual closing track, seems like what the concept of C,XOXO (which you’ll hopefully get the gist of by the time I’ve given all my recommendations) tried and failed to be.

The Camila album cover

Romance is one of my favorite albums of all time, but the coinciding COVID-19 pandemic brought everything down. The album’s tour, which I had tickets to, was canceled, and I can only imagine how different Cabello's career could’ve been.

One of the singles, “Living Proof”, allows Cabello to showcase her vocal strength as the chorus goes high in her upper register. The writing provides another example of what she could’ve done on C,XOXO, with lines like, “Tell me something, but say it with your hands”. “Feel it Twice” shows Cabello both embracing a new love and getting over someone from her past who’s hurt that she moved on. “Dream of You”, my all-time favorite Cabello track, has a sparkling dream pop sound. “Used to This” has mellower pop production and describes a romance that makes everything better. In “First Man”, Cabello consoles her father who is scared to see her trusting a man beside himself. The album closes with the line, “You don’t even know how much it means to me now that you were the first man that really loved me”.

The Romance album cover

Familia shows the change in time since the love in Romance and additionally features Spanish lyrics. “Bam Bam” with Ed Sheeran does both, doing the first part with, “I said, ‘I love you for life’, but I just sold our house’”. Upbeat acoustic guitar plays throughout. “Quiet” is yet again what C,XOXO could’ve been. She’s taken into a different world with her lover, and the sound returns to her roots. “everyone at this party” closes the album on a sad note, referring to her now ex-lover from Romance haunting her anxiety at parties. Fully acoustic, she again closes the album with a strong line, “Hey, did you realize you don’t need me?”

I can’t help but wonder if that line was meant to foreshadow Cabello’s change in image. 

The Familia album cover

The name C,XOXO is a little too on the nose of Cabello’s debut album title, Camila. Based on the theme and cover of this album, I assume the title was meant to come off as sexy, but as a fan, it just looks like she ran out of ideas. Maybe that’s the point, considering that the album is full of fillers that it sounds like Cabello put absolutely no effort into. Or rather, that Drake put absolutely no effort into. One of the tracks, “Uuugly”, doesn’t even have Cabello listed as an artist. Drake spends the entire thing threatening to fight someone, and I was left even more confused than I was after hearing BLP Kosher talking for an entire earlier track about how grateful he was to be on the album. Out of the fourteen tracks, I only liked one (“June Gloom”) enough to put it on my playlist.

The C,XOXO album cover

While Cabello’s first two albums make me want to believe she could return to her old popularity, having a slow, two-album downfall dramatically lowered that chance. Another Shawn Mendes collaboration could get her close, but I find that it’s very unusual for an artist to come back from this kind of decline. Nonetheless, I’m happy to be proved wrong. Cabello was one of my favorite artists for years, and I’d love to have her back in that spot.