Alessia Cara is finally giving the last song on her third album a picture to go with it. The official video for “Apartment Song” — track 18 and the closing cut on In the Meantime — lands Thursday at noon ET, she announced on X, calling it “my last offering for ITM5 week.”
“Better late than never,” she wrote, with an orange-and-blue heart.
The clock matters here. In the Meantime turns five on Sept. 24, which makes this the week to settle up with it. It’s her best-reviewed record — an 80 out of 100 on Metacritic — and one she wrote entirely by herself, much of it in her bedroom during lockdown.
All 18 tracks carry her sole writing credit, with a single guest turn from CHIKA on “Middle Ground,” and she framed the project as an album about “the meantime between life and death.” Of “Apartment Song” and neighbors like “Bluebird” and “Slow Lie,” she said the record required her to “experience different forms of pain to regain my footing.”
The video campaign, though, ran out of gas early. “Sweet Dream” got a clip from Tusk Creative the same day its single dropped in July 2021; “Shapeshifter” premiered on CBS This Morning; “Best Days” arrived with the album on Sept. 24, 2021. The last visual of the era, “You Let Me Down,” surfaced in May 2022, directed by her brother Dario Caracciolo. Then Cara moved on: her fourth album, Love & Hyperbole, landed Feb. 14, 2025.
She has pried the album open before. A deluxe edition with six extra songs came in January 2022, followed by an anniversary edition that September. Five years is usually when the retouching stops.
Which makes an official “Apartment Song” video a genuine outlier. Album campaigns almost never circle back to track 18.
The video drops Thursday at 12 p.m. ET. Five years on, the album’s last song gets to be the last word.
