Camila Cabello makes her breathy voice take centre stage on her new single I Luv It, trying to capture the hormonal chants of infatuation. Her partner in crime is Playboi Carti and his deep-voice rapping. All their sweet nothings become sonic somethings.

“He’s so meticulous and so choosy, and he has really created this world. I love this song too, because I feel like I gave myself the freedom from a songwriter perspective to be like... I don’t know, I was listening to a lot of old rap, and I really was like, ‘Oh, I haven’t really played around with repetition like this before.’ And a lot of my favourite 2000 hip hop songs are call and response or repetition. And I think I kind of put pressure on myself before to be like... in order for me to be a songwriter, songwriter, it has to be all these lyrics,” Cabello told Zane Lowe on New Music Daily on Apple Music 1. Lowe, of course, is Apple Music’s trusted figure and musicians find his presence therapeutic.

All that took to make Playboi Carti a part of the song is DM-ing on Instagram. Yup, that’s how collaborations are getting done these days.

“I DMed him. He’s mysterious and whatever. And I was just like, you know what? I’m just going to DM him. I said: ‘Hey, butterfly.’ And then he said, ‘CC’ and then I said: ‘Carti.’ It was really cute,” said Cabello.

Soon the conversation between Cabello and Playboi Carti turned towards Miami because he spends a lot of time in Miami and Atlanta. “He really loved the kind of visual stuff that I was leaning into. I was just like: ‘Hey, come by. Let’s hang out. Let me play you some music.’ And I played him this song because I think Pablo (Diaz), Jasper (Harris) and I were like, he would just be so sick on this song and we genuinely thought he would love the song, and he did. And we have similar ways of working, and for me, my writing process is just kind of freestyling, and then we work from that. But yeah, he just went into the booth and we were just so excited and we’re drinking Don Julio… it was just sick.”

Camila Cabello in the video for her latest song, I Luv It

‘Everything is about the song’

Cabello has been missing from sonic action for some time. She last released her album Familia in 2022, featuring songs Psychofreak with Willow, Bam Bam with Ed Sheeran, and Don’t Go Yet. Last year, she starred as Viva in Trolls: Band Together. For the soundtrack, she participated in the track It Takes Two.

No wonder she is looking forward to her next chapter and album. “I’ve always been just like a song-based artiste. I heard Charli say the other day, it’s like artistry is more important than songs. I was always the opposite mentality. I was always like, everything is about the song. 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… three-minute piece of music sound. I think it’s because I started diving deeper into bodies of work and artistes. I love the way Lana or Carti 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. I learned so much from Pablo and Jasper,” she told Lowe on Apple Music 1.

In the process, she is keen to leave certain things behind. “What you’re hearing is kind of an undiluted version of my creative process now. I love working with co-writers and I think it’s really fun, but this time around I was like, I think the kind of projects that I want to make only works when there are no other co-writers, and when it’s kind of just me honing in on the craft and really putting it on me, putting the writing part, the songwriting part on me, and really putting in that work every day of expanding my references and writing lyrics and ideas down every day.”