It’s taken eight years for Alessia Cara to follow fellow Canadian Justin Bieber’s path from teenage YouTube posts to the Grammys. This year’s best new artist at the ceremony, Cara first took wing with her staggeringly self-assured 2015 debut single, Here, a tale of creeping loneliness at a party and the attendant privations and disappointments of being a young woman. It sounded like tectonic plates shifting, opening up a crack between generations. Know-It-All, her debut album of the same year, had less of the shock of the new, with brash, generic playlist productions that left her lost in their echo and clatter.
Pleasingly, this follow-up gives the now 22-year-old’s voice more power and presence, although it’s still not clear if she needs a USP answer to Rihanna’s Caribbean croak, or Sheeran’s studied guilelessness, to become a superstar. Perhaps Cara’s greatest strength lies in her perceptive use of words and images that move smoothly from the personal to the universal. I Don’t Want To, Growing Pains, Comfortable and, particularly, 7 Days are all excellent examples of sensible-sweater, big-sister pop.
