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“This is just a capsule of the last year of my life,” Alessia Cara explained to Apple Music's Strombo about her third album. “Throughout the creation of this proce, I hit a few different rock bottom, and I think through those rock bottom, I found some sort of catalyst for changing the way that I was living.” It's heavy context for a project that often lands on the ear gently, light-heartedly even, but the contrast is in part the point. On “Unboxing Intro”, she seems to come apart, growing steadily more frenzied as she sings: “Need some clarity, I miss therapy/Hyperbolic, melancholic/Do I call him? I feel nauseous/Have I lost it? Have I almost hit the bottom?” But the production on “Box in the Ocean”, which immediately follow, suggests the bottom is a tropical island away from it all rather than the claustrophobic places of her mind encapsulated in the lyric. According to Cara, this is by design. She points to the soothing lullaby swing of “Sweet Dream” as an example—a song that details the difficulty of trying to sleep when it feels impossible to quiet the voice in your head. “I try to juxtapose a lot of the heavier themes with some more humorous lyrics or some more fun-sounding thing,” she say. “But ultimately the root of it was a lot of struggle and a lot of difficulty.” .

via Apple Music

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