Since breaking through in 2015 with her sleeper hit “Here”, the Canadian singer-songwriter has wrangled pop smashes out of topics that others avoid, from body image issues to feeling weird at parties. On her fourth album, Alessia Cara’s the first to tell herself to snap out of it: “Lonely in LA, I’m such a cliché,” she sighs on “Go Outside!” while wallowing in bed, nursing a fresh heartbreak. The deceptively upbeat first half of Love & Hyperbole draws from ’90s neo-soul and 2000s R&B: Shades of Alicia Keys and Faith Evans echo through songs like “Dead Man”, a piano-driven throwback about trying to defibrillate a dying relationship. But something shifts around “(Isn’t It) Obvious”, which sneaks in an uncredited guitar solo from John Mayer: The sky stops falling—or rather, Cara finds that it wasn’t falling to begin with. Rather than overburden a relationship with expectations, she simply lets love in, and by “Clearly”, she wipes the slate clean with a promise: “Forget about the rest, and start over for the first time.”