Cara Delevingne Is Ready to Reintroduce Herself

Reported by Vogue.

Cara Delevingne has spent over a decade being other people's vision. Karl Lagerfeld's muse. A Burberry runway fixture. A comic-book villain. A West End ingénue. All of it real, none of it quite hers. Now, at 32, she's doing the thing she's always wanted to do — and she didn't wait until she felt ready. "I was never going to be 'ready,'" she says. "But I always knew that I would one day."

This week, Delevingne released her debut singles — "I Forgot" and "Out of My Head" — as a joint seven-minute film directed by Severance director Jessica Lee Gagné, whom Delevingne cold-recruited after watching episodes on mute with her own songs playing over the footage. The result is exactly as unhinged and intentional as that sounds: cinematic, surreal, distorted-electronic, emotionally exposed. She financed it herself. "You have one chance to make an entrance," she says, "so you might as well make it flashy." According to Vogue, a full album via Warner Records follows this summer, with a tour launching in June.

The Songs Were Always for Her First

Music was never a detour for Delevingne — it was the original plan. She was playing drums at seven, writing introspective lyrics as a teenager, and locking herself in the bathroom to perform them alone. The album she's releasing now pulls from all of it: Notes app fragments, a poem written in her late teens about mental health, and songs built over the last three or four years. "My Notes are a graveyard of random stuff — kind of like a time machine," she says. The opening track is that early poem. The two lead singles bleed into each other deliberately, because that's how the emotions actually worked: not categorized, not clean, just one feeling rolling into the next.

"I Forgot" came from her first day back in the studio after a years-long break — she walked in and said, "I forgot the world is real," and that became the song. "Out of My Head," originally titled "Talking Heads," started as a mental image of a last supper where no one says what they actually mean. Both tracks carry the DNA of '90s female singer-songwriters — women weaponizing frustration in their voices — filtered through rave culture and something rawer. Her production process is equally anarchic: Voice Notes recorded while half-asleep, bridges she describes as "drug-induced jazz orgies," no fixed method.

The music video shot in Montreal over five days, inside an abandoned department store full of old mannequins, during an unplanned blizzard that made it onto film anyway. "Stuff that definitely wasn't in the budget, but people would pay so much money to have," she says. This is Delevingne operating outside anyone else's brief — no director casting her, no designer dressing her for someone else's story. She wanted the album to feel like a rebirth, and for once, she built the whole thing herself.

The woman who spent years being someone else's muse has finally decided to become her own.

Read the original at Vogue.