Former Fifth harmony member Camila Cabello is off to great start in her solo career. Her debut album, Camila, just climbed to number 1 at the Billboard 200 chart, cementing her as a pop force to be reckoned with.
As Billboard reports, Camila earned 119,000 equivalent album units in the week ending Jan. 18, citing data from Nielsen Music. A huge portion of those sales — 65,000 — were traditional CD sales, it's worth noting. Cabello has now become the first female artist in three years to climb to number 1 with her debut full-length album.
Cabello first broke into the Billboard chart as part of Fifth Harmony, with both of the group's singles climbing up the charts a few years back. But Camila is her first appearance at the top spot, as all the singles released by Fifth Harmony have never managed to climb higher than the fourth place on the all-genre chart.
Currently, the biggest single off Camila is "Havana," featuring rapper Young Thug, the music video for which currently has 456 million views on YouTube — and counting. The second single, titled "Never Be The Same" is also gaining significant traction around the world, with 28 million views on YouTube as of this writing.
Cabello's solo career has been a journey of zigzags, so to speak. Camila was originally set to be released in the fall of last year, and it was supposed to be titled The Hurting. The Healing. The Loving., but Cabello changed her mind before finishing the album. The release date was then pushed to January 2018, and the original lead single, "Crying in the Club," which wasn't a chart-topping success, was dropped from the LP entirely. On top of all this, Cabello also received some flak from her former Fifth Harmony friends, which she admitted hurt her feelings.
"It definitely hurt my feelings," she told The New York Times. "I wasn't expecting it, I wasn't prepared for it — especially because at that point Id moved on from it. I was just like, 'What? Why?'"
What the singer referred to was a Fifth Harmony performance during the VMAs in which the act started with five girls — but when they took off the hood of their jackets, one of the women was yanked off stage. Many thought it was a diss aimed at Cabello for leaving the group in 2016, a snide one at that. However, the group clarified that the act was supposed to be a representation of the media, and it was supposed to signify that even with four girls left, they're stronger and will strive to do better.
Camila was released Jan. 12.
