Alessia Cara talks love, life, and the making of Love & Hyperbole

A decade after releasing her debut single, “Here,” Alessia Cara put out her fourth album, Love & Hyperbole, on February 14, 2025. While her previous work came from a place of fire and angst, Cara said, “I just feel a lot softer than I used to be in a good way. I feel a lot more expanded.” This growth is something she hopes long-time fans recognize both sonically and lyrically. For new fans, she welcomes them into the family and hopes they go back and catch up on her previous work.

Despite having an impressive career already with wins like Best New Artist at the GRAMMY Awards and Songwriter of the Year at the Juno Awards, Cara is constantly setting goals and reshaping them for herself. She doesn’t get caught up in trying to compare her success to when she was younger and thinks setting too many expectations can kill the creative process a bit.

When prompted about what makes a hit record, Cara said she doesn’t think there is a secret formula. Rather, the thread that ties successful records together is that they hit people differently and make them feel something. She advised, “I think simplicity is always the best route to take when trying to reach a large group of people.”

Love & Hyperbole is full of emotion, tackling topics that she hasn’t explored as much in her work before, including new forms of love, fear, and impermanence. It stands out as her most personal and proudest project thus far. Inspired by her favorite music from the ‘60s and ‘70s, she recorded about 90% of the album live, just jamming out and feeding off the energy in the room. She was finally able to create the music that she has always wanted to create.

Fittingly, Cara opened up about her changing perspective on love. She has always considered herself a romantic, but finding the love she always wanted and strived for changed her views. “What I took as sacrifice was actually just making myself very small and suppressing myself as an act of love,” she reflected. “Real love is actually supposed to be something that expands you and shows you parts of yourself that you didn’t know were there rather than suppress you.”

As for what she hopes people take away from the album, Cara said, “The one thing that I hope people take from this, especially young women, is just the fact that, you know, I think that we see like pain and loss and joy and love as two different things…But I do think having contrast in life is super important.” If we experience loss and pain, it tends to mean that we loved and tried our best. For Cara, this is something that she sees as a gain and thing to learn from, rather than something to push away.

Listen to Love & Hyperbole on Spotify:

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