Camila Cabello came to The Tonight Show to play on Wednesday night (June 12), with robot dogs, ice cold stories and killer dance moves. In addition to performing her frenetic single “I Luv It” with help from blindfolded dancers, Cabello talked about her upcoming album, C, XOXO (June 28)) played a new game with host Jimmy Fallon and cleared up some rumors about her viral frozen Met Gala purse.
Cabello and Fallon reminisced about running into each other at the annual fashion fantasia earlier this year and the singer admitted that by the time she saw Jimmy she was “very drunk” because she was so stressed from what happened earlier. Fallon then pulled out a picture of Cabello’s purse from that night, which consisted of a rose frozen in a block of ice.
“I didn’t think about the fact that ice, very quickly, melts,” Cabello said. “And so I get there and it’s my worst, the nightmare situation where suddenly the clutch breaks. I think it was Ed Sheeran was there he was telling a joke or something and somebody accidentally moved it and before I get my picture taken the clutch completely breaks.”
Cabello described being surrounded by shocked A-listers including poet Amanda Gorman, actress Rachel Sennott and model Kaia Gerber, who all gasped when the purse’s straps broke off. “This is the thing you least want to happen — a bunch of famous people looking at you having a breakdown during the line before you take your picture at the Met Gala!” So Camila said she turned to Gerber and a few others for advice, landing on the solution of converting it into a (very slippery) clutch instead.
Fallon then assured Cabello that she was “glamorously” holding the block of ice, putting up a picture of a stone-faced Camila cradling the drippy purse. Also, for the record, she threw cold water on the viral report that her purse cost $25,000. “Guys! It’s water frozen!” she yelled. “You can make it at home!”
Cabello also explained her fourth album’s title, saying the new collection is a chapter in her life that feels “personal to me and authentic to me and like signed by me. Like writing a letter to someone. This is me, like it or not.” When Jimmy asked Cabello about her writing process, after noting that she has no co-writers on this album, Cabello gave an example of her skills by busting out her phone to sing a tune she wrote for the show on her way to the studio.
The voice note featured Cabello humming lightly while she sang, “New suit, same chair, new dress, blonde hair/ We’ve seen each other through some phases/ Past lives, debuts, Met Ball, saw you/ Good to have a friend in scary places/ Jimmy-a, Jimmy-a, Jimmy alright/ They came for a show well Jimmy alright/ It’s another late night/ It’s another late night talkin’,” as an astonished Fallon looked on.
The singer came back for a round of the new game Dance Charades, in which one player wore headphones and danced to a song whose title the other player had to guess. Cabello proved to be quite adept at the game, acting out Olivia Rodrigo’s “Vampire” while pretending to bite her arm as Fallon shimmied awkwardly to Shakira’s “Hips Don’t Lie.”
Cabello came back one more time to sing “I Luv It,” the first single from her follow-up to her 2022 LP Familia, which features guest spots from Drake, Lil Nas X, Playboi Carti and City Girls. The set opened with Cabello in a silver dress, baggy leather gloves and a black blindfold with white x’s over her eyes — a spooky look her four dancers mirrored — in the high-energy performance that featured her back-up crew holding a pair of dancing Unitree robot dogs on leashes as giant fans sent their strappy costumes flying.
Watch Cabello on The Tonight Show below.