Camila Cabello, Romance review: A sweet if flawed demonstration of artistic identity

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Spotify announced this week that the most streamed track of 2019 was “Señorita”, the sweltering summer single from Camila Cabello and Shawn Mendes, an unbearably tactile real-life couple who have been anointed the Britney and JT of the Gen-Y set. For Cabello, alumni of the defunct girl group Fifth Harmony, it marked her second Latin-tinged smash after 2017’s “Havana”. The equally raspy “Cry for Me” is essentially Imogen Heap meets Carlos Santana, complete with an electric guitar solo that sounds directly lifted from the latter’s Rob Thomas collaboration “Smooth”. And a few too many songs feel like carbon copies of other people’s, particularly “This Love”, a thinly-veiled pastiche of Rihanna’s “Love on the Brain” that never takes off in the same way.