"I Luv It" is the lead single from Camila Cabello's fourth album, C, XOXO. A glitchy pop tune with a trap beat, it features the enigmatic rapper Playboi Carti, who is known for his dark, gritty flow.
The song explodes with Cabello feeling like a rebellious rocket shooting through space, "wicked and diabolic." Then the chorus kicks in, a dizzying loop of pure, chaotic affection: "I love it, I love it, I love it," she chants like a mantra. Is it a bad boy? A crazy night? We don't know, but she's hooked!
"Certain things in our human realm do make me feel like I'm in outer space, and the very rare few times where I've had incredible chemistry with someone is one of them," Cabello said of the song. "Part of that cocktail is also the emotional drama between you and that person, and the chaos and butterflies and nerves and passion. It's unsustainable and not peaceful and exhausting, but also, I LUV IT."
Playboi Carti throws a curve with his verse. He's reflecting on a past love, wondering if they've changed and grown apart. His escape comes in the form of drugs, fast cars, and a raw, gritty portrayal of numbing the pain.
During the chorus, Cabello interpolates the chorus of Rihanna's 2011 track "
Cockiness (Love It)." The post-chorus is a direct sample of the first and last two lines of the chorus of Gucci Mane's 2009 track "
Lemonade."
The song was written by Camila Cabello and Playboi Carti and created alongside executive producer Pablo "El Guincho" Diaz (Rosalia, J Balvin, Billie Eilish) and co-producer Jasper Harris (Baby Keem, Jack Harlow, Roddy Rich).
At the time of the song's release, Playboi Carti was riding a hot streak. In 2024, he'd already guested on Ye and Ty Dolla $ign's "
Carnival" and brought his magic touch to Future and Metro Boomin's "
Type S--t." Cabello hoped he'd sprinkle his gold dust on "I Luv It" too.
So how did this unexpected collab between the Fifth Harmony alumna and rage rapper come about? Turns out, Cabello wasn't afraid to shoot her shot. She slid into Carti's DMs with a simple "Hey, butterfly," and the rest is history.
Their connection was instant, bonding over their shared love for Miami. Then they hung out in the studio, sipping Don Julio tequila.
"I played him this song, because I think me and Pablo and Jasper were like, he would just be so sick on this song and we genuinely thought he would love the song, and he did," Cabello told Apple Music's Zane Lowe. "And we have similar ways of working, and for me, my writing process is just kind of free-styling, and then we work from that. But yeah, he just went in the booth and we were just so excited and we just like, we're drinking Don Julio, and it was just sick."
Camila Cabello unleashes chaos in the song's pandemonium-filled video. Director Nicolas Mendez throws her into a whirlwind of stunts - wrestling, tree-climbing, fake car crashes, even a gas pump "drink." Playboi Carti joins the madness that is second nature to him.
"The music video is me embracing the chaos of the song," explained Cabello to King Kong Magazine. "There is a lot of different symbolic vignettes of me getting into trouble and enjoying it. Playboi Carti showed up at 3AM to shoot his part and it was super fun to get to sing our song together."
Gone are the laid-back acoustic vibes of Camila Cabello's 2022 album,
Familia.
C, XOXO embraces a bolder sound with a focus on pulsating synths throughout its 14 experimental tracks. "I knew that, sonically, it was going to be very synth-heavy,"
Cabello explained to Official Charts. "There are no guitars on this album. It's a lot of different synths. Synths, samples and very aggressive drums."
"It's actually pretty minimalistic. There's just three or four layers of sound; that's the one thing everything on this album has in common," she added. "I said, from the beginning, that my last album was so sonically bright; I wanted this one to be the polar opposite. The nighttime."
