Alessia Cara's sophomore album The Pains of Growing arrived in late November 2018, just as people were beginning to settle on their favorite projects of the year. There were a lot of albums that I'd loved that year, ones that I had been able to sit with for much longer. The Pains of Growing, however, stuck with me in a much different way. Within the first handful of times listening through the album it already felt like a classic, as though I had been listening to it for years. There's an element of Alessia's vocal and lyrical delivery that can make the thoughts and feelings of a stranger feel like your own, as thoroughly demonstrated on the album's piano ballad "Out Of Love."
The accompanying visual for "Out Of Love" is minimal in dramatic performances. We're introduced to a number of characters, but never learn much about them. The song soundtracks the end of a relationship, punctuated by one partner running out of love for the other. The subject is already so deeply emotional, and delivered with verses like "I can't float in an ocean / That's already been drained / I won't cry at your feet now /I know my tears will fall in vain" and a final chorus that switches from asking "When did you fall out of love, out of love?" to "When did you run out of love for me?" The music video's simplistic presentation of the blissful moments of love, a couple hidden under a tent of sheets and admiring a butterfly and another sharing a bath, only intensifies the blow of their relationship's downfall.
Alessia is but a bystander, observing. She had written the song at the request of a friend who couldn't quite articulate the feeling of longing to know the exact moment when one person falls out of love with another. We don't get to know when that moment is for the couples highlighted here, it just sort of happens–fully soundtracked by the emotional outpour of "Out Of Love."
Alessia Cara is currently on tour with Shawn Mendes. Tickets to her upcoming headline shows in Canada are available here.
The Pains of Growing is available now.
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