RADAR What Camila Cabello did next; the peculiarities of playing a porn star; this fall’s chicest exhibit.

WHAT DO POP STARS DO on their day off? Well, if you’re Camila Cabello and you happen to find yourself with free time in Winnipeg, you eschew sightseeing for the kind of activity that can be found in any strip mall in suburbia. “My team and I did one of those games where you have to solve puzzles to escape from a locked room,” explains the 20-year-old Cuban-American over the phone from Manitoba, where she’s hours away from opening for Bruno Mars. “We got out but not within the time limit.” h

For Cabello to bring up breaking free from a constraining situation is...interesting. That’s because she was a member of the chart-topping girl group Fifth Harmony until late last year, when she left the band with the kind of exit that makes management ask you to avoid any questions on the topic.

It’s fortunate, then, that Cabello has plenty of other things going on that are unrelated to whether her split from the group she’d been a part of for five years was amicable or not. Over the past few months, she was named a face for both Guess Jeans and L’Oréal Paris, released three Billboard Top 100 singles and, of course, completed a soulful, R&Binflected album slated for release this fall. How long have you been working on The Hurting, The Healing, The Loving? “About five months. I had my last stretch of writing a few weeks ago, and then I was like, ‘Okay, I have enough songs that I’m proud of.’” Is there anything about this album that’s going to surprise people who thought they knew you? “Honestly, people will be surprised mostly because nobody really knows me yet; they know me as a celebrity but not as an artist. Since I come from a girl group, people expect me to do sexy songs and music videos. Something that I loved about working with Frank Dukes [Canadian producer who has worked with Lorde, Zayn and Frank Ocean] on this album is that from the beginning, he saw me as I see myself and he got that I’m trying to do something different. I want to make music that makes you feel something. It’s hard for a lot of people to wrap their heads around that.” How are you changing their minds? “Once people get in a room with me and see that I’m actually a writer, they’re like, ‘Oh, I get it. She actually has stuff she wants to say.’” And what is that? “There are so many different sides to me, and what I want to say depends on what I’m feeling or experiencing in the moment. I write songs that are really emotional, but at the same time I have songs that are super-fun and confident. Over the past five years, I’ve written a lot just by myself; when I started writing for this album, I was a bit shy and insecure, because what if real writers say that I’m not really that good? But with the help of some incredible people, I now have the confidence to be like, ‘I know what I want to say.’” Is there a song on this album that means a lot to you? “‘I’ll Never Be the Same.’ I wrote it in a hotel bathroom when I was, like, 16, and it’s my heart.”