Pop quintet Fifth Harmony just released their new single “Work From Home,” the lead tip from their just-announced sophomore album, 7/27, due out May 20 via Epic.
“Our A&R Joey [Arbagey] played it to us one day, and he was like, ‘Oh, this is gonna be a big one’,” the group’s Camila Cabello told SPIN over the phone. “We heard it and we just fell in love with it. We were just obsessed with it because it’s laid-back and chill and has a kind of urban pocket to it. I think that’s why we loved it so much, because it branched out in different ways than everything else we’d recorded, and when you’re making an album, you always want to find different pieces of the puzzle, not just one of the same.”
Cabello says part of the reason the group’s new single connected with all of the members is because of the way its chorus emphasizes gender equality in terms of who’s actually, well, meant to put in work; it’s empowerment on Fifth Harmony’s own terms. “That’s something that’s been instilled in us by our moms and our families since we were very little, because obviously — especially in the music industry — it’s very male-dominated,” the 19-year-old says. “For the first time in a long time, the Hot 100 is being dominated by female artists, but before, it was really, really rare that the top five songs on iTunes were all female artists… I think that’s what’s helped with this new social awareness of what it means to be a feminist and what it means to be a woman and what it means to fight for equality and destroy all the gender-institutionalized thinking that existed before about gender roles.”
Produced by Ammo, “Work From Home” also features SPIN cover star Ty Dolla $ign, who pops in for the slick third verse and rides the beat with ease. “Honestly, that’s my favorite part of the song,” Cabello says. “Ty added such an amazing flair to it… the way that he plays with the melody and his dissonant notes. He made his own hooky part out of the bridge.”
Fifth Harmony also dropped the “Work From Home” video in the same blast this morning; the visual — helmed by Director X, who’s also responsible for Drake’s “Hotline Bling” video — finds all five group members dancing around a construction site before they’re eventually joined by Ty Dolla $ign. Watch that below.
And for the uninitiated: 7/27 refers to the date that Fifth Harmony came together for the first time on the U.S. version of Simon Cowell’s singing competition, X Factor. “We’re always gonna be those girls,” Cabello says. “It’s kind of like starting over. Because that was the day we were formed, this is gonna be the next album — this era. This part of Fifth Harmony is formed.”
