Camila Cabello says her new album is exploring her “hyper-femme villain arc”Camila Cabello says her new album is exploring her “hyper-femme villain arc”

Dimitrious Giannoudis

Camila Cabello just dropped her new single, “I LUV IT,” featuring Playboi Carti, but hasn’t yet released any details about her upcoming album.  However, she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe that it’ll have one very important difference from all of her previous work.

“[There’s] one thing I have done on this album that I don’t feel like… I feel like I was getting to before, but for me, I’ve always been just like a song-based artist. I heard Charli [XCX] say the other day, it’s like artistry is more important than songs. I was always the opposite mentality,” she explains.

“I was always like, everything is about the song,” she continues. “That was everything for me. It was just isolated from the name or who did it or whatever, it was just about how does this four-minute, whatever, three-minute piece of music sound.”

But now, Camila says, she’s thinking of her music as more of an entire artistic work. “I think it’s because I started diving deeper into bodies of work and artists,” she says. “I was like, ‘I love the way Lana [Del Rey] or Carti … they just, like, create a whole world, and it makes the music so much richer.'”

“So I think I’d attempted to do that before, but never got the full gist of it,” says Camila. “And I learned so much from [my collaborators] and really studying this time around the character, the world, the motifs.”

Echoing her previous statement to Paper magazine that she’s playing a character on the album, Camila tells Zane that her new aesthetic — blonde hair and what she calls “the baby pink color, the lip gloss” — has helped her create the character.

“[It’s] my villain arc,” she says. “My hyper-femme villain arc, that was the beginning.”

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