#cc1vibes

And you're in the same fucking bed

Wish I had no expectations

But I expect, you expect, we expect"

★★★★☆

Camila Cabello’s Havana appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in September and made the 20-year-old Mexican-Cuban singer a star. With a minor-key melody and a sultry Latin mood, the song is redolent of good times and suffused with a wistful sense of loss, in ways that only a composition about feeling as if you belong in Havana while fancying a boy from Atlanta can be. Barack Obama included it in his favourite tracks of 2017. Now arrives Cabello’s solo debut album and, like the hit that made her name, it is rather unexpected.

Cabello comes from pure pop pedigree. Having moved with her family from Havana to Mexico to Miami in early childhood, in 2012 she auditioned for the US X Factor and ended up in Fifth Harmony, one of those singing groups that the show forms as a way of shunting together a bunch of contestants it doesn’t otherwise know what to do with.

Cabello left in late 2016 amid accusations of jealousy, although she gave her own, wonderfully showbiz reason for jumping ship: the girl band “wasn’t the maximum expression of me individually”. We can safely assume that a self-titled album featuring a picture of her on the cover is the maximum expression of her individually, and it turns out to be a charming, rather modest, surprisingly reflective pop album to welcome in 2018.

At this early point in Cabello’s career you would expect her album to be filled with high-octane pop bangers. Instead she has gone the other way, taking a leaf out of Justin Bieber’s book and using acoustic guitars and sparse production techniques to frame songs about love and longing. “Hesitation, awkward conversation, expectation,” she sings breathily on the sad piano ballad Consequences, listing the side-effects of heartbreak. It sounds like an unlikely cross between Mariah Carey and Joni Mitchell, and it is rather lovely.

Treated vocal harmonies give a dreamy, disembodied air to All These Years, on which Cabello asks, “Does she kiss you like I kiss you?” with touching pathos, while on Real Friends she weighs up the price of ambition as she realises that she is surrounded by people interested in her status, not her character. “I think I’ll stay in tonight, skip the conversations and the ‘Oh, I’m fines,’ ” she sings, more to herself than anyone.

There are touches of the Latin pop that you would expect from the singer of Havana, particularly on the skittish Inside Out, while Into It is the kind of heavily suggestive song about sex that every album by a young, good-looking female pop star seems contractually obliged to feature, even in these days of feminist awakening. But the surprise here is how intimate and natural Cabello’s debut sounds, and how she has succeeded in making an album that is personal without resorting to the revelation of private details. It really is the maximum expression of her, individually. (Syco)