Shawn Mendes Is Heartbroken — and Anxious About Climate Change — on ‘What the Hell Are We Dying For?’

Shawn Mendes is back, returning amidst a whirlwind of wildfires and a reported break-up, with a new song, “What the Hell Are We Dying For?”

Mendes teased the song Thursday before its midnight release with the extremely pointed cover art — a photo of the New York City skyline barely visible under a shroud of smoke from the ongoing wildfires in Canada. The song’s opening lines appeared to nod to this latest, glaring bit of evidence of the ongoing climate catastrophe, with a bunch of personal heartbreak thrown in as well: “Smoke in the air, the city’s burning down/I wanna speak, but I don’t make a sound/Locked in my mind, you’re all I think about/I wanna save us but I don’t know how.”

On Twitter, Mendes explained the lyrics and cover art for “What the Hell Are We Dying For?” weren’t just a coincidence or something more craven: “Started writing this song yesterday morning with my friends in upstate New York & finished it only a few hours ago,” he said. “Felt so important to me to share with you guys in real time.”

Despite the opening nod to the fires, the song appears to mostly just be about the end of a relationship (reports did emerge this week that Mendes and longtime on-again-off-again partner Camilla Cabello are now, once again, off again). You could, we guess, extrapolate Mendes’ stadium-sized woe about the agony and futility heartbreak engenders — “If you’re not mine and I’m not yours/What the hell are we dying for?” — to the existential dread wrought by the ecological eschaton… but only if you want. 

“What the Hell Are We Dying For?” marks Mendes’ first song of 2023. His last album, Wonder dropped in 2020, and after that, he dropped a series of loose singles in 2021, as well as a track for the Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile soundtrack in 2022 (Mendes also voiced the titular crocodile in the movie).

Back in February, Mendes said in an interview that he was looking forward to returning to the studio after canceling the remainder of his 2022 Wonder tour to take a break and focus on his mental health. 

“I’m at the point where I’m like, ‘OK, I’m ready to start making some songs,’ which is exciting,” he told The Wall Street Journal, adding: “The process was very difficult. A lot of doing therapy, a lot of trying to understand how I was feeling and what was making me feel that way. And then doing the work to help myself and heal. And also leaning on people in my life to help a little bit.”

From Rolling Stone US.