Camila Cabello Unleashes Her Freak

Camila Cabello’s Miami, much like the artist herself, is constantly under construction. Cabello’s Miami expresses itself as a bottle-blonde fantasy, with dark roots breaking through its platinum gloss. Her Miami lives in the bands of neon sherbet that blanket the sky at daybreak, when sleepy-eyed morning ravers amble into taxis downtown. The Miami she loves is nestled on the shores of the Atlantic Ocean, warm as bathwater and clear enough to study your hot-pink pedicure under the lazy waves.

With her latest album, C,XOXO, she hoped to transform these memories into a kaleidoscopic tribute to her hometown. “I remember listening to Bad Bunny’s album Un Verano Sin Ti, which was so attached to Puerto Rico,” Cabello says. “I’m not from Puerto Rico, but it made me love where I’m from. And I like the contagiousness of that, of pride in where you’re from. I think Miami is the only place that I’ve ever felt like is my home. I love London, I love New York, but I don’t feel completely myself there. My past and my future self, all my selves, are in Miami.”

Cabello’s Los Angeles, however, is more akin to an office — she may keep a small apartment here, but she establishes early on that she’s here to work. We meet over berry smoothies on a mild, hazy day in October, on the rooftop of the Soho House in West Hollywood. A few minutes before our interview begins, she swans into the lobby dressed for Pilates class, in a gray sweater and a leopard-print headband.

Cabello, 27, has been on an internet diet for a few weeks now. She thumbs her iPhone to show me the sparse landscape of her home screen. Aside from basic communication and texting, she’s sticking to reading The New York Times and Vogue and ordering meals on Uber Eats. “I don’t have social media apps,” she says. They offered too much access to too many opinions that didn’t serve her, especially after taking the biggest artistic swing of her career. C,XOXO, released in June, is her “hyperfemme villain arc,” as she’s described it, a cinematic concept record that swerves between pop, hip-hop, and global rhythms. The album got favorable reviews from critics, but it didn’t fit into a neat and tidy genre box, so it got shoved into one anyway: After her first single, the dayglow Playboi Carti collaboration “I LUV IT,” drew unfavorable comparisons to Charli XCX, some corners of pop fandom wrote off the project as a full-on hyperpop pivot.

For Cabello, who wrote all her own lyrics and top-line melodies for the album, the reaction stung. “I said something like ‘elements of hyperpop’ [somewhere],” she explains. “I hate that I said that, because people ran with this thing before the album was even out.” She loves Charli — “She’s one of my favorite artists, you know?” — but there’s more to the album. “‘Twentysomethings’ is literally a guitar song about being broken up with in New York. I can tell that people saying this weren’t even listening to the music. They didn’t do the reading. They didn’t do the listening.”

She shrugs and sighs. “I don’t want to sound like I’m a bitter sailor. I think I was on the internet too much, and I think that really hurt me. And then I got off the internet.”

Trying to be seen for who she really is has been, in many ways, the story of Cabello’s career. From her start in the X Factor–formed girl group Fifth Harmony through the big identity statements of her solo records — 2018’s Camila, 2019’s Romance, 2022’s Familia — to her time in the celebrity gossip crosshairs, her desire to be understood is deeply felt. But if the path from prefab pop girlie to capital-A artiste is long and daunting, she has plenty of icons in her corner. Like Taylor Swift, who picked Cabello to open her Reputation Stadium Tour in 2018. Or Britney Spears, who described Cabello as her “girl crush” in an October Instagram post and praised her “sweet and kooky” personality. (Spears was a judge on Cabello’s season of The X Factor.) “All I wanna do in this lifetime is make Britney Spears giggle,” says Cabello.

And then there’s the queen of all girl-group alumni: Beyoncé. At business mogul Michael Rubin’s famed white party in the Hamptons this summer, she gave Cabello a few words of encouragement. “She was like, ‘I love your new album.’ I think I said something like, ‘I literally would not be here without you.’”

“Oh, f*ck, now I’m going to sound name-drop-y,” Cabello says with a laugh. “But Beyoncé told me she loved my album, OK? That’s the gold star. And I walked away fully, like, tears brimming in my eyes. She’s somebody I’ve watched from my childhood. Her and Taylor saying nice things about the album really meant a lot to me. Anytime an artist that I respect has said something to me like, ‘Hey, I really love what you’re doing,’ it recharges my battery. A lot of the time I felt so misunderstood.”

She takes a breath and looks out to the L.A. skyline. “This was a hard album cycle for me. It was really challenging from an audience point of view. I wrote this whole album, and people are questioning my authenticity. It’s kind of like a trippy thing. Like, this came from my gut.”

Still, the experience affirmed something for Cabello: She’d rather take a risk and stand out than be palatable for the sake of it. “My favorite albums are kind of polarizing. Not all people understand it, but the people that love it? Really love it. Even when I felt misunderstood, it felt like people were more passionate about my music than they have been in a while. And that’s cool. I feel like that’s what my favorite artist is.”

Miami wasn’t always home for Cabello. Born in Havana to a Cuban mother and Mexican father, she spent her early childhood in Mexico City. At age 6, Cabello’s mother, Sinuhe Estrabao, told her they were catching a bus to Disney World; instead, they rode for 36 hours to Miami, where they moved in with Cabello’s godmother and waited 18 months for her father, Alejandro, to join them.

“I’m so close to my parents,” says Cabello, who lives part-time with them and her teen sister in Coral Gables, a posh neighborhood in South Miami. (When she needs space, she absconds to her apartment in Sunny Isles.) “We have way more in common than we don’t. I’m kind of like an old soul. That’s such a cringey [term]. But in a lot of ways, sometimes I struggle to be in 2024. I think there is an arrogance of youth. I listen to my parents and grandparents, even if I don’t agree with them. The older I get, [the more] intellectual humility is the most important thing.”

Estrabao is often by her side at photo shoots and industry events, and she joined Cabello for a C,XOXO listening party in New York earlier this year. “There are definitely times when [my parents] are like, ‘Oh my God, the lyrics!’” Cabello says, cackling. “My mom will be like, ‘You’re swearing too much on stage! You’re like, f*ck! Bitch! in interviews!’ At first I’ll be a little stubborn, but then I’ll be like, ‘OK, that’s fair.’ But when it comes to the music I make, I don’t want to hear it, because that’s my expression. That’s like you telling me I can’t date this person. That’s not gonna happen!”

“This was a hard album cycle for me. I wrote this whole album, and people are questioning my authenticity. Like, this came from my gut.”

Cabello was only a freshman at Miami Palmetto Senior High School when she auditioned for the 2012 season of The X Factor, where she was ultimately sorted into Fifth Harmony. Although the group placed in third, judge Simon Cowell signed Fifth Harmony to his record label, Syco Music. As the group swiftly racked up R&B-inflected bubblegum hits like “Worth It” and “Work From Home,” Cabello’s vocal chops and brat swagger primed her to become a breakout star. Following a contentious exit from the group in 2016, she quickly released a few solo tracks, but her career finally went stratospheric when she tapped into the rich musical reserves of her Cuban heritage. The result was her 2017 hit “Havana,” a Son Cubano-trap fusion featuring Young Thug. It became her first No. 1 single and earned her a Grammy nomination.

As Latin music experienced a global, post-“Despacito” renaissance in the late 2010s and early 2020s, Cabello was figuring out in real time where her art would fit in — and, in turn, how her heritage fit into her art. She scored another chart-topper with “Señorita,” a flirty duet with her then-boyfriend, Shawn Mendes. And on 2022’s bilingual Familia, she paid tribute to salsa icon Celia Cruz, dabbled in the Mexican sounds of mariachi, and invited anglophone acts like Ed Sheeran and Willow Smith to remix their own sounds with a Caribbean flair.

“As an immigrant, I don’t feel like I completely fit in with people that [grew] up in the United States. I always feel in this weird middle ground where nobody is ever going to fully understand me,” she says. At the heart of C,XOXO was a desire to define her own experience of Latinidad, inside the bustling melting pot of Miami. “[Being] from Miami, it does feel like its own nationality. It’s the only place that feels like home, and the only place that I feel like can take all of me. Miami’s the only place that understands all of us.”

To realize her Miami dreams in C,XOXO, Cabello called up L.A. hip-hop producer Jasper Harris, a close friend, and Pablo Díaz-Reixa, aka El Guincho, the intrepid Spanish artist-producer known for his work with Rosalía. “Our overarching mission was to make something fresh,” says Harris, “and a big part of the album that Pablo really pushed was contrast.”

Miami, a city of immigrants and strivers of all stripes, is defined by its fusions — in 2023, linguists identified the Spanglish creole spoken there as an emerging English dialect, with its own rules and quirks. Díaz-Reixa says C,XOXO captures “the chaos of driving around Biscayne with the windows down and hearing all kinds of records playing at the same time.”

“Conflict resolution — those are skills you don’t have when you’re 16. How do you deal with being left out? How do you deal with jealousy?”

The lovelorn piano ballad “B.O.A.T.” features a drive-by interpolation of Pitbull’s “Hotel Room Service,” flipping his 2009 stupid-fun party staple into some numb, ethereal heartbreak. (“Originally it had rock-ish power guitars, like Olivia Rodrigo,” says Harris. “But Pablo was like, ‘What if we keep the original vocal take, but then we just play soft piano instead?’”) Cabello elsewhere turns the dial back to 2007 on “DREAM-GIRLS,” in which lines from The-Dream’s hip-hop classic “Shawty Is Da Sh*t” meet the carefree bounce of reggaeton. On “HOT UPTOWN” with Drake, the two playfully tease each other to the frisky pace of dancehall.

The crew even tested out material on joyrides in Cabello’s white Tesla. “It was so much easier for people to put me into the box of ‘Havana,’” Cabello says. “I also listen to Lana and Playboi Carti and The 1975. That’s harder for you to understand. Maybe that’s why people were like, ‘I don’t get [C,XOXO].’ Maybe [the ‘Havana’] version of me was easier for you to digest, but that doesn’t mean that’s all of me.”

As much as Cabello could hear the sounds of C,XOXO in her head, she could see them too: “Velvety blue, pink, purple, lavender — that’s my essence,” she says. The album feels “like what it is to be a Pisces.”

Director Harmony Korine’s vision of dark Florida in the 2012 crime drama Spring Breakers, which starred Selena Gomez and a balaclava-clad Vanessa Hudgens, was also a reference. To evoke the debauchery she saw in Korine’s movie, Cabello wrote “Dade County Dreaming,” an ode to cold-blooded party girls who prowl the bars on Collins Ave. until daybreak — or, at least until the liquor wears off and reality sets in. JT and Yung Miami, the duo formerly known as City Girls, make one of their last joint appearances on the track amid their recent falling-out. “We needed to do it for the city,” she says of working with the pair.

“When people think about Miami, they think it’s so fake and all party, kind of surface-level. It doesn’t feel real,” Cabello says. “The Florida that I grew up in is not that dark [compared to the film],” but the grit of Spring Breakers spoke to her. “I like the power of the girls. There’s some part of me that always wanted to belong to a girl gang. What I wanted to create for C,XOXO was this sense of power.”

“Maybe it’s because I’ve always been such a good girl,” she adds. “Being in the industry made me build that harder shell and harder exterior. Like Rihanna, Beyoncé, Taylor — this kind of bravado happens in their later work. It’s building an armor. My previous albums were more clean-cut, like: ‘I’m so in love and happy, blah, blah, blah!’ They were daytime albums. I like the idea of [C,XOXO] being nocturnal. More friction, more complicated: ‘This is wrong, but I kind of like it.’”

“I don’t want to be singing about feeling super horny, but then, like, this guy is right here [in the studio].”

But what about the actual girl gang she was in — Fifth Harmony? With time, she looks back on her years in the group, and the anxiety she dealt with, with compassion. “I don’t know if I was struggling more than a normal teenager should, because it’s hard to say what’s normal, whether you’re famous or not,” she says. “My barometer wasn’t functional. It was more than a person should bear [in that situation]. I think conflict resolution is really important, especially when it comes to a group. Those are skills you don’t have when you’re 16 years old. How do you deal with being left out? How do you deal with jealousy? How do you deal with these things without hurting yourself or other people?”

A wave of clarity washed over her when she saw her former bandmate Normani at Paris Fashion Week in September — not as a co-worker, nor a competitor, but as a fellow accomplished grown woman. “I remember times when we’d just be laughing so hard,” says Cabello. “With space, we can go back and tap into that. The past couple of times I’ve seen her, I say something and she laughs really hard. It doesn’t feel like we’re strangers. We’re getting back to the times when we really close.”

For all the bad bitch energy it exudes, C,XOXO is also an open-vein coming-of-age album written in the shadow of a public breakup. Cabello and Shawn Mendes dated from the summer of 2019 until late 2021 — give or take a few rendezvous. (They were last spotted kissing at Coachella in April 2023.) Throughout the record, the romantic woes Cabello sings about center a push-pull dynamic that just won’t quit. “Gotta have a sense of humor when it comes to us / Don’t know what the f*ck I’m doing,” she professes in “Twentysomethings.”

But no song got people talking like “June Gloom,” a sensual, hypnagogic tour de force in which Cabello alludes to an on-again-off-again relationship (“Is this gonna end ever? / I guess I’ll f*ck around and find out”) and the specter of another, perhaps famous, woman (“She’s cool, I heard / Won’t act surprised I saw the pictures”), with the candor of someone reading their sexts out loud (“Does she get this wet for you, baby?”). “The hook lyrics were so vulnerable and brave in a way I hadn’t seen from her yet,” Harris says. “I couldn’t stop smiling.”

Online sleuths wasted no time deciding the song was about Mendes and Sabrina Carpenter, who were spotted out together in 2023 — and Carpenter invited further speculation when she released the taunting “Taste,” about a lover going back to his ex, and cast Jenna Ortega in the music video. The internet hadn’t been this consumed by a supposed pop love triangle since, well, Carpenter was maybe the “blonde girl” Olivia Rodrigo was singing about in “drivers license.”

“There’s some part of me that always wanted to belong to a girl gang.”

In conversation, Cabello carefully dances around mentioning Mendes, or anyone else, by name, no doubt wary of serving up an easy headline for the blogosphere. (On that front, Mendes has it covered: “If something was to happen to me, she’d probably be the first person I call,” he recently said of Cabello in The New York Times.) But, perhaps to compensate, she goes into great detail about everything else about the song.

“I wrote ‘June Gloom’ after I had hung out with [the song’s subject],” she says. “I went into the studio the next day and said, ‘Jasper, can you play me some beats?’ He was like, ‘This one, this one,’ and he skipped over ‘June Gloom.’ I was like, ‘Oh wait! Go back!’” That’s when Cabello kicked him out of the studio.

“When I know I’m about to be intimate, I don’t want anybody [there]. I don’t want to be singing about feeling super horny, but then, like, this guy is right here. I wrote it so fast because to me, everything is so personal.” She furrows her brow. “I was like, ‘I’m writing this for you, bitch!’”

“Oh,” she pauses. “‘Bitch’ sounds like I’m talking about a girl. I just don’t want them to think it’s me being like girl-versus-girl. Can we say, ‘It’s about you, motherf*cker?’”

Cabello may not be as neatly branded and manicured as what the American pop ecosystem is used to digesting. But in pockets all over the world, there are people who ride for Cabello’s experimental twists and turns — whether she’s dancing with a dog mask on at Glastonbury or serving “whimsical diva” on a playground spinner at Rock in Rio.

She writes for the Bad Bitch on Collins, the Daddy’s Girl in Coral Gables. She writes for the Strong Eldest Daughter who clocks out of stardom to take her family to Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights. She writes for the moody Miami babe who listens to both Ethel Cain and Calle 13 — which is to say, these days, Cabello is resolved to write for herself before anyone else. “No matter how much you say, I feel like some people are committed to misunderstanding you,” she says. “I kind of made my peace with that. I’m just like, ‘OK, your loss. Your loss!’”

Belonging, she’s realized, won’t be found in a genre or any one corner of the industry, but in the world she creates in her own songs, where other unmoored diaspora girls (and anyone else who gets it) are free to join in. In unleashing her own freakness on C,XOXO, she invites her fans to unleash themselves, too.

She folds her arms and gazes out across the city once more. “You put everything into [a record] for like two years, and some naive part of you is only thinking about how much people are going to love it,” she says. “Now I just think about how much I love it and how much fun I’m having making it.”

Top image credits: Brandon Maxwell dress, Movado watch (worn as necklace), and Jenny Bird ring