I’ll be honest with you upfront: I came to this album as someone who needed it. I’ve spent the better part of this year trying to figure out who I am outside of the expectations I’ve let accumulate around me, and when Shawn Mendes released “Shawn,” his self-titled fourth studio album, it felt less like a new record and more like someone handing me a mirror. That’s a strange thing to say in a music review. But Mendes is doing something strange here — something that resists the usual language of criticism — and I think it deserves an honest response in kind.

Shawn is not a polished album. It is not a triumphant comeback or a reinvention. It is, more than anything, a document of a person actively mid-process, learning to stop pleasing everyone, trying to grieve things he blocked out, wrestling with who he is when no one’s watching. Mendes doesn’t resolve these questions. He just shows you where he is with them. In a cultural moment that rewards certainty and punishes uncertainty, that choice takes more courage than it looks like.

Learning to not know

The album announces its intentions immediately. On the opening track, “Who I Am,” Mendes sings: “Got a lot of talk in my brain right now / Sorry, gotta do it, gotta let you down,” he sings. It’s a disarming confession for an opening line, the kind of admission that most people make only in private, if at all. Mendes puts it front and center. It’s a beautiful continuation of the vulnerability he hinted at in his “In Wonder” documentary.

That same refusal to wrap things up runs through “Why Why Why,” a track that spirals through exhaustion and self-doubt with almost uncomfortable honesty. “Feels like everything goes round and round and round,” he sings, and then, with a sudden lurch into specificity: “Thought I was about to be a father / Shook me to the core, I’m still a kid.” The lyric lands not because it’s shocking, but because it’s unresolved. He’s not telling you he got through it. He’s telling you he’s still in it.

In his interview with Zane Lowe, Mendes traced this quality back to something he’s been trying to unlearn since he was a teenager. “When I was younger, there was a pleasing of everyone — at any interview, at any moment,” he said. “I’m just gonna be relaxed and be myself, and whatever that outcome is, it’s probably gonna be the best outcome for me.” You can hear the effort of that learning across the album, the tension between the version of himself that was trained to perform and the version that’s trying to just exist

Identity, faith, and the boxes people build

Nowhere is that tension more audible than on “The Mountain,” which addresses head-on the years of public speculation about Mendes’ sexuality. “You can say I’m too young / You can say I’m too old / You can say I like girls or boys / Whatever fits your mold.” The delivery is quiet — almost understated — which makes it hit harder than a defensive anthem would. He’s not arguing. He’s just declining to participate.

At a recent show at Red Rocks, Mendes addressed the speculation directly from the stage. “Since I was really young, there’s been this thing about my sexuality and people have been talking about it for so long,” he said. “I think it’s kind of silly because I think sexuality is such a beautifully complex thing and it’s so hard to just put it into boxes. It always felt like an intrusion on something very personal to me. Something that I was figuring out in myself. Something that I had yet to discover and still have yet to discover.”

He continued: “The real truth about my life and my sexuality is that I’m just figuring it out like everyone and I don’t really know sometimes and I know other times. It feels really scary because we live in a society that has a lot to say about that and I’m trying to be really brave and just allow myself to be a human and feel things.”

What’s notable about these words isn’t that they’re a revelation, it’s that they’re a refusal. A refusal to perform certainty he doesn’t have, to hand the public a label they can file away. Mendes has faced years of media coverage that prioritized this question over his music, and his answer, both in that speech and across this album, is essentially: this is mine, and I’m still figuring it out, and that’s allowed. In a culture that tends to demand that people, especially public ones, declare themselves fully formed, that kind of patient self-permission is genuinely courageous.

This theme of identity extends into the spiritual, too. Mendes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah,” a song he’s performed before, but never, by his own account, truly understood, becomes something different in the context of this album. “I never really could grasp the concept of what [Cohen] was reckoning with, which was the idea of God and spirit,” Mendes said in a recent interview. “And at 26, after going through my own kind of relationship with that, those lyrics just felt so resonant.” The cover doesn’t sound like a showpiece. It sounds like a man using someone else’s words because he finally knows what they mean.

“Heart of Gold”

The album’s most devastating moment begins with a song title that, for a long time, Mendes couldn’t explain.

During a Clubhouse session, Mendes told the story of “Heart of Gold,” a story he had, without quite realizing it, buried for years. When he was around 13 or 14, he had a close friend named Deijomi. “I loved Deijomi,” he said, his voice breaking. “He was so sensitive. We spent every day together for years.” When Mendes started making music and began traveling, the friendship faded. Later, a mutual friend named Brian called with news: Deijomi had died of an overdose.

Mendes says he went numb. He didn’t process it. He moved on, or thought he had.

Years later, in the studio, Mendes and his collaborators were working on a song called “Heart of Gold” without a clear sense of what it was really about. It was his collaborator Scott who asked the question that broke something open: “Didn’t you have a friend who passed away from an overdose?” Mendes said no. Then Brian, sitting right there in the room, said Deijomi’s name, and everything came back at once.

“The second he said his name it just all caught up to me,” Mendes said. “Years of pain that I never processed. And I still haven’t.”

The song that emerged is a letter to his lost friend: vivid, almost spiritual, full of imagery of golden light breaking through a roof to find Deijomi wherever he is. It acknowledges the guilt of distance, the helplessness of grief that arrives too late, and something that edges toward peace without quite getting there. It’s one of the most honest songs Mendes has ever recorded, and one of the best on this album.

“Every time we got to play this song, every time people started to learn the song, they’d be singing, and he would hear it,” Mendes said. “And it just felt like the greatest thing ever. Deijomi, I love you, man. This one is for you.”

It’s a reminder of how music can be a bridge between the past and the present, the living and the lost.

Love, anxiety, and the journal he keeps opening

Grief isn’t the only thing Mendes is working through. “That’ll Be The Day” captures the particular ache of a love that doesn’t resolve cleanly — “You could move away, you could build a home / With somebody I don’t know… This love is here to stay” — less a breakup song than an honest portrait of how feelings linger past their supposed expiration date.

On “Why Why Why,” he returns to a recurring image: “Opened up my journal to a page / Everything that hurts me still the same.” It’s a small detail that lands with unusual weight. Not dramatic growth, not transformation, just the same things, waiting. “Isn’t That Enough” extends the anxiety further, with “My hands still shaking / My mind’s still racing,” language that doesn’t aestheticize mental struggle so much as report it plainly.

This is where Shawn distinguishes itself most clearly from the polished emotional storytelling of his earlier work. These songs aren’t asking for resolution. They’re asking for witness.

What the album doesn’t quite do

It would be easy to call Shawn a masterpiece of vulnerability and leave it there. But the album isn’t without its loose edges. A few tracks feel less fully realized and present as concepts more than as songs. The Zane Lowe interview material, fascinating as it is, sometimes does the work that the music should be doing on its own. And occasionally, the rawness tips into formlessness: moments where you wish Mendes had pushed the lyric one step further into specificity rather than resting on the feeling itself.

None of this makes the album less affecting. But it’s worth noting that Shawn is not a complete artistic statement so much as an honest partial one, which may, in fact, be exactly the point.

The whole truth

Mendes doesn’t have everything figured out. He says so repeatedly, in the music and out of it. What makes Shawn worth sitting with is that he’s stopped pretending otherwise.

Tracks like “Heavy” and “Nobody Knows” have stayed with me in the way that music does when it articulates something you’ve been carrying without words. The album doesn’t promise resolution or offer a tidy narrative of growth. It offers something more honest and more useful: the sound of someone learning to be a person, in public, without a script. Mendes is reminding us that it’s okay not to have everything figured out, that there’s a kind of strength in admitting you’re lost and staying in the room anyway.

In that, Shawn feels less like an album than a dispatch. And one worth reading closely.