After three years of radio silence from pop sensation Alessia Cara, she will finally make her return in February 2025 with Love & Hyperbole – her fourth studio album since 2015’s hugely successful Know-It-All.
Ahead of her much anticipated release, we sat down with the singer-songwriter for an exclusive interview about what to expect from the new music, her creative process, and overcoming an intense period of writer’s block.
“So much has happened over the last three years,” Cara tells me. “I’ve started a relationship with someone, and I’ve developed a new relationship with myself as a songwriter. There’s been a lot of self-reflection.”
As any songwriter knows, creativity often strikes suddenly, without warning, and that’s when you start developing new material. But it wasn’t so easy for Cara this time around.
“Usually inspiration comes quickly, but this time it didn’t. I was managing a lot of self-doubt, fuelled by insecurity, and just feeling really stuck and lost and confused,” she tells me.
“But as the album progresses you can hear how I open myself up to joy. Once I started to accept that things were changing, I felt a lot more at ease.”
“Dead Man” and “Isn’t It (Obvious)” are both exciting indications of what to expect sonically from the album. There’s a heap of contemporary influence; moody touches of Billie Eilish and the sprightly bedroom pop of Olivia Rodrigo.
But then there are nostalgic references too. “I love music of the ’70s and the ’60s even,” says Cara, “and later, artists like Fleetwood Mac, Sade, Erykah Badu, The Black Eyed Peas, Amy Winehouse…”
Almost all of the songs were recorded and played with a live band, bringing an alive and often unpredictable energy to Love & Hyperbole.
Take the last minute of “Dead Man” as an example. A full blown, big-band Gatsby-esque horns arrangement pulled straight out of the roaring ’20s is not at all what you’d expect from a soulful pop crooner like Alessia Cara, but it’s wildly refreshing at the same time.
As she starts to experiment more freely, Alessia Cara is entering a new era, and this is just the start.
