After pop artist Shawn Mendes kept a low profile on social media starting on Friday, Sept. 23, he announced that he was going to be releasing a new single on Friday, Oct. 2, his fourth album, “Wonder,” on Friday, Dec. 4, and a Netflix documentary, “In Wonder”, coming out on Monday, Nov. 23. Shocked, his fan base could not wait for the single to come out.
Mendes has released two songs on the album so far- “Intro” and “Wonder.” “Intro” is only a minute long and its purpose is to introduce what to expect from the rest of the album. The song “Wonder” has become a sensation amongst listeners.
After being released, “Wonder” has already gained over 64 million streams solely on Spotify and over 32 million views on YouTube for the music video. Since this is his first music video and single that Mendes has released in a while, the fans seemed to enjoy them.
The music video is very different from what typical Mendes’ videos are like. It is more of what a basic pop-artist music video looks like today. His traditional style of music videos have always been him alone and not much happening during the video, so this new video is different from what his fans are used to seeing from him. The video includes background dancers which is something he does not use often, but it put a thought into people’s heads about if he was attempting to change his technique to something a bit different.
Although the song’s manner seems very similar to Mendes’ other songs, it has its differences as well. It has a similar form of an upbeat song with catchy lyrics, but with a few changes that are not usually in a Shawn Mendes song. Shorter than his other songs, having fewer verses, “Wonder” is only two minutes and 53 seconds long. Adding a third verse to the song would make it sound more like his other ones, which would not be ideal.
The song seemed a bit repetitive since it only had two verses and the chorus, it felt like it was missing something. It is missing the “wow” factor that is present in other Shawn Mendes songs. It felt like the background choir and instrumental sounds were clashing with Mendes’ powerful voice, instead of feeling like everything was working together and blending in sound.
While the sounds of the song seemed to not be working extremely well together, Mendes’ songwriting skills shined through the strange background noises. A repeating line, “I wonder what it’s like to be loved by you,” seems to mean a lot to Mendes and is a lyric that many people can relate to. Mendes has written countless amounts of songs relating to past relationships and break-ups, so it is easy to assume that this lyric is related to one of these.
Seeing that Mendes’ song style is changing and evolving makes fans of his and other spectators excited to see what’s next for him. “Wonder” is a great segue for changing his music style and creating buzz towards the rest of the album.
