Consider the summer officially extended. Alessia Cara says her new project is out — her words were blunter: “she’s outtttt” — and she is framing it as a deliberate bookend rather than a fresh start.
The Grammy winner announced the release on X, calling it “such a fun and full-circle way to close out the 5 year anniversary of one of my most special albums,” and signing off with alternating orange and blue hearts — the two-tone palette her fans tie to the This Summer era.
That album was the six-track This Summer EP, released Sept. 6, 2019, and written largely on the road while Cara toured behind 2018’s The Pains of Growing. It was her first non-traditional project — no radio-courting singles cycle, just a looser, more melancholy detour — and it has hung around her catalog longer than its modest tracklist suggests.
A year later she gave it a second life. This Summer: Live Off the Floor, released July 17, 2020, rebuilt the songs from the ground up with a full band in the room, expanding the set to include older singles like “Here” and “Scars to Your Beautiful.” Producer Jon Levine helmed it, and Cara pledged all of her personal proceeds from the record for the next 21 years to Save the Children.
The anniversary release lands mid-sprint for Cara, who has been unusually productive since February. Her fourth studio album, Love & Hyperbole, arrived Feb. 14, 2025, and a deluxe edition followed on Oct. 24 with eight previously unreleased tracks. Among them: a duet version of “(Isn’t It) Obvious” with Lucky Daye and a reworked “Nighttime Thing” featuring Julia Michaels.
She has been on the road for it, too, playing a two-week North American headline run that opened Oct. 29 at The Fillmore in San Francisco and stops in Los Angeles, Denver, Minneapolis, Chicago, Boston and Washington, D.C. before wrapping Nov. 12 at the Keswick Theatre outside Philadelphia.
For an artist whose earliest hits leaned nostalgic, going back to This Summer is not a retreat. Cara has said those songs taught her to find strength in pain rather than let it consume her — a lesson she carried straight into the love-drunk material she is touring now.
The orange and blue hearts are back. So, apparently, is summer.
