There’s still one more full day before Shawn Mendes’ self-titled third album is released, but one lucky group of 15 fans has already heard the whole thing.
On Wednesday (May 23), Mendes shared a video from a secret listening session that went down in the very place the singer/songwriter recorded his new album: the scenic Woodshed studio, which overlooks the Malibu coastline. He brought in the dozen-plus superfans, armed with Bose noise-canceling headphones, to all sit and listen to the project together.
The first song he played for the fans is “Nervous,” which was released earlier Wednesday. “Speaking of nervous…,” he laughs as he presses play for his first focus group.
He also previewed his Khalid collab “Youth,” which the pair performed for the first time at Sunday’s Billboard Music Awards. For the impactful performance, Mendes and Khalid were joined by the show choir from Stoneman Douglas High School, the site of a mass school shooting in February, nodding to Shawn’s original inspiration for the song. “I love this idea of ‘youth’ — not our age, not us being young, but that thing that’s inside of us that makes us think the world is amazing,” he told the fans. “You know, that childish lens that makes you wake up and think you can do anything. And anytime one of these events happens, one of these horrific things happen, that youth gets pulled away from us a little bit more.”
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Of course, the fans also heard a slew of songs we haven’t heard yet, so stay tuned for the album’s release Friday and live vicariously through the lucky group of 15 below.