Selena Gomez Wants to ‘Make People Smile’ With Her New Album: It’s ‘Very Pop’

Selena Gomez wants to release music that makes people happy. In her new cover story with Vanity Fair, the “My Mind and Me” singer shared new details about what her upcoming album is going to sound like, saying she’s opting for a “very pop” sound.

“If I had my way, I would probably write ballads my whole life, but I want to produce music that will make people smile,” she said. “The music I’m doing right now is about real things that I’m walking through. It’s really powerful, strong, very pop.”

“The theme generally is freedom — freedom from relationships, freedom from the darkness,” she added.

It’s a similar tease to what she shared with Rolling Stone for a cover story late last year, where she revealed that she had already written 24 songs for the project and was hoping to have more writing sessions ahead of its release.

“‘My Mind and Me’ is a little sad,” she told Rolling Stone, “but it’s also a really nice way of putting a button on the documentary part of life, and then it’ll just be fun stories of me living my life and going on dates and having conversations with myself.”

She added, “I feel like it’s going be an album that’s like, ‘Oh, she’s not in that place anymore; she’s actually just living life.’”

In her Vanity Fair interview, the Only Murders in the Building actress explained how she’s completely rid herself of social media, and instead has opted for her assistants to run her digital accounts.

“The world was my high school for the longest time, and I started getting inundated with information that I didn’t want. I went through a hard time in a breakup and I didn’t want to see any of the [feedback] — not necessarily about the relationship, but the opinions of me versus [someone] else,” she told the magazine. “There’d be thousands of really nice comments, but my mind goes straight to the mean one.”

She added, “People can call me ugly or stupid and I’m like, Whatever. But these people get detailed. They write paragraphs that are so specific and mean. I would constantly be crying. I constantly had anxiety…I couldn’t do it anymore. It was a waste of my time.”

Along with collaborating with Nigerian star Rema on “Calm Down” and Coldplay on “Let Somebody Go,” Gomez released her track “My Mind and Me” last year. Her forthcoming album will follow her 2021 Spanish-langauge EP Revelación and 2020’s Rare.