According to a 2018 HITS Daily Double interview, “Never Be the Same” was initially titled “Nicotine.” Its December 7 drop date was announced via Twitter on December 6, 2017. The single was released alongside “Real Friends.”

Camila Cabello teased an unofficial music video via Twitter on December 29, 2017, calling it a “New Year’s Eve gift” for her fans. On February 14, 2018, she announced her first tour as a solo artist, which was named after the song. According to a 2017 Rolling Stone article, it was “inspired by a relationship she had a couple of years back.”

Camila also considers it to be the best track she’s written so far, explaining in a September 2017 Official Charts article that it only took an hour to write. “Never Be The Same” can be seen as the prequel of the relationship that broke Camila in her subsequent January 2018 track, “Consequences”:

…It’s kind of like the aftermath of ‘Never Be the Same.’ I feel like a lot of the songs could be in this one story, and all the different phases, and I feel like ‘Consequences’ is the aftermath of a love that was intoxicating like that, and hard to get out of your mind; or the kind of love that you compare to everybody else and it’s not the same.

–from Coup de Main magazine (February 2018)