Camila Cabello - Camila

The Guardian 80

What girl band? The singer who left Fifth Harmony has, against the odds, really come up with the goods – from affecting piano ballads to breezy reggaeton

For connoisseurs of the piquant moment when a manufactured pop band goes awry, Camila Cabello’s acrimonious 2016 departure from US X Factor runners-up Fifth Harmony provided rich pickings. It had it all. First, the curious sound of a manufactured pop band member huffily protesting that being in a manufactured pop band is stifling their capacity for self-expression, as if they mistakenly thought they were joining an experimental free-improvisation quintet along the lines of the AMM. The brief period where everyone involved starts behaving as if a member of a manufactured pop band leaving is a global humanitarian tragedy that must be prevented at all costs: according to a report in Billboard magazine, Fifth Harmony’s management did everything short of demanding the United Nations deploy a peacekeeping force, insisting the band took a therapist on the road with them and organising something referred to as a “come to Jesus meeting” with then-Epic Records CEO LA Reid. The entertaining mutual slanging match reached a peak when Fifth Harmony performed at last year’s MTV VMAs with an anonymous figure in Cabello’s place, who immediately fell backwards from the stage, as if they’d employed a sniper and had her shot.

And finally, there’s the enticing prospect of an album from the departee that bitterly picks over their recent past in the manner of Robbie Williams’ early post-Take That oeuvre. At one point, Cabello’s solo debut was going to be released under the winningly portentous title The Hurting. The Healing. The Loving, while a track scheduled to appear on it, called I Have Questions, let her former bandmates have it in no uncertain terms: “Why don’t you care? I gave you all of me … I should never ever have trusted you”, etc.

Pitchfork 68

The former Fifth Harmony member’s debut solo album is largely successful at capturing her charismatic flair. Anchored by the wonderful “Havana,” it shines especially when it's light and breezy.

The Guardian 60

(Syco/Epic/Sony)
The former member of American girl group Fifth Harmony shows she’s equipped to go it alone on her frisky debut album

Her heart, famously, is in Havana, “ooh, na, na”. Camila Cabello’s head, however, is firmly on her shoulders, if her debut solo album is anything to go by. Tuneful, to-the-point and unexpectedly nuanced for a commercial pop record in which the writing credits are so lengthy as to require their own postcode, Camila proves that the 20-year-old Cuban-Mexican-American creative was wise to go it alone.

Cabello left the mothership of her successful girl group, the US X Factor-orchestrated Fifth Harmony, just over a year ago. Despite the bad blood spilt on social media, the story was as old as manufactured pop itself: talented and ambitious artist chafes at enforced group-sing, aims higher. Having co-fronted – and, critically, co-authored – two big solo hits while still in Fifth Harmony, I Know What You Did Last Summer, with Shawn Mendes, and Bad Things, with Machine Gun Kelly, Cabello’s solo success became an inevitability – one rewarded tenfold last summer with Havana (feat Young Thug), a massive international No 1 hit whose Latino sing-song melody required a forklift to shift from your head and, indeed, from the top of the UK charts for five weeks. Those “na na na’s” could easily double as a playground taunt tossed over Cabello’s shoulder to Fifth Harmony.