Shawn Mendes's relevatory new album art shows in a single glance that the pop star is growing up

A few years ago, a boy named Shawn Peter Raul Mendes amassed a fanbase by posting musical covers to Vine and YouTube from his bedroom in Pickering, Ontario. Today, his strategy is a little different.

A month after "In My Blood," the confessional lead single from the 19-year-old pop prince's third album — released today — Mendes offered the first visual cue of what the new work would not only sound but look like. A cryptic live stream appeared on Mendes's YouTube channel that, in obvious tribute to Frank Ocean's Endless, displayed artisans labouring silently in a workshop over the course of nine hours. The stream culminated in a sudden reveal: a huge, sumptuous canvas featuring a painting of the singer's face obstructed by an outgrowth of flowers. In real time, fans witnessed the creation and unveiling of a massive replica of the album art for what would be christened Shawn Mendes.

While the covers of his previous two records, Handwritten and Illuminate, maintain a distance by using homespun photos of the burgeoning pop star, the image for this self-titled work completely opens the singer up. Mendes, dashing as he is, has surely been photographed from every possible angle — but this radiant depiction, with his million-dollar face severed for a floral arrangement to burst through the cracks in his porcelain skin, seemed to promise a side of the teenager the world hadn't wholly laid eyes on before: his inside. That is, until the internet noticed that the iconography sort of rang a bell.

Brazilian artist Marcelo Monreal's has built an oeuvre from his digital portrait series Faces [UN]Bonded, which consists of photos of actors and models whose faces have been dislodged to reveal the natural beauty that lurks behind outward appearance. Fans instantly drew the link between Monreal's project to Mendes's new album artwork, and the singer was thrust into his closest brush with anything resembling scandal when some tweets accused the singer and his team of stealing from the collage artist. But, as the adage goes, good artists borrow while great artists and app developers steal. Mendes had taken direct inspiration from a fan edit, conceived using a filter on the photo editing app Photo Lab, which had itself co-opted Monreal's [UN]Bonded design. The singer's team had seen this, and sought out Monreal to bring the current album art to fruition. It was all a big misunderstanding.

Last night, in response to a Twitter question about the reason for self-titling his newest output, Mendes responded: "I wanted to stamp this moment in time at 19 because ive [sic] never felt so true to myself." Self-titled albums are typically meant to serve one of two purposes. For innumerable musicians it's their debut, their grand announcement of themselves to the world: Bowie, Madonna, Fleetwood Mac. When a self-titled record surfaces later in a career, however, it typically signals reinvention — think the surprise visual album that ushered in a whole new golden era of Beyoncé, or The Beatles' transcendental, revolutionary White Album.

Now, our dear Shawn Mendes is only a few years into what will surely be a long-lasting career, so why should he have to announce himself again? He's undoubtedly flourished into a household name. His singles have been peaking high on the charts for the past three years and he was even named one of Time Magazine's Most Influential People of 2018. We know him, we get his thing. So then, apart from all of that, who exactly is the Shawn Mendes who's revealing himself to us on this latest effort?

Shawn Mendes is both flirtatious and devastating. Its opener, "In My Blood," details his relatively newfound battles with anxiety, and at points throughout the album he hints — in varying modes of falsetto — about using alcohol to cope, waking everyday to horrific news headlines, one night stands where the lover has run off come morning, unrelenting heartbreak. Who hurt this sweet boy?

Doing rounds of press for the release, Mendes confessed that he hasn't actually ever fallen in love or had his heart broken, joking that it makes him a "phony" given it's the subject of his entire discography to date. That's where his team of collaborators come in — he's been fostering sturdy relationships with a number of songwriting mentors, including John Mayer, Teddy Geiger, Ryan Tedder of OneRepublic and Ed Sheeran, all of whose more seasoned run-ins with romance likely informed the record they collectively gave birth to. Mendes also teamed up with peers Julia Michaels and Khalid for two of the album's duets, penning a particular resonant track with the latter in response to last year's Manchester Arena bombing after an Ariana Grande concert.

In the 1962 National Film Board documentary Lonely Boy, 19-year-old heartthrob Paul Anka admits that he's aware his career is largely the result of his fanbase's desire for him. "I think that they kind of feel if I'm singing like a lonely boy," he says, "they like to feel that they're the girl that I'm singing about." Mendes exhibits a similar self-awareness about his status in the industry today. Defining himself too distinctly in any one direction might be detrimental to his career.

Shawn Mendes the album only begins to reveal things hitherto unknown about Shawn Mendes the artist — but it ultimately reinforces that he's a tremendous talent, surrounded by a solid support system, who's headed in the right direction. He's a kid with his feet on the ground and so much room to grow — and that growth is happening before our eyes.