Tropicoqueta by KAROL G
With every album since 2017’s <i>Unstoppable</i>, KAROL G progressively moved beyond expectations. Clearly not content with being the top reggaetonera on the scene, the Colombian singer refined and repositioned herself with each new full-length, from the beach dreaminess of <i>OCEAN</i> through the diverse sides of her <i>MAÑANA SERÁ BONITO</i> era. Her unapologetic eagerness to cross genre lines while still building with long-time allies like Ovy On the Drums grew her global fanbase exponentially, outpacing just about everyone else in Latin music who emerged during the mid-2010s boom. “It’s amazing because it’s a dream come true to have all the genres that I touch, the musicians that I work with, producers, composers, the places that I went to get this album done—even the time that I had to talk to myself...and be really focused on the process,” she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Now fully vested in the trappings of megastardom, she offers what is easily her most ambitious album to date in <i>Tropicoqueta</i>, its titular portmanteau a marked pivot that reflects how reggaetón’s baddest bichota successfully evolved into one of the world’s biggest pop artists. Among the album’s triumphs is just how at ease KAROL sounds on these 20 shapeshifting tracks, adapting and thriving over different sounds in ways that even some of her famous peers could never. “I really wanted to go to the roots, and I went back to all the maestros in the music, like even the arrangement people, all of them in every genre,” she says. “More than new and fresh, it feels like home. It feels like roots. It feels like what we used to be, and now we’re kind of forgetting where we come from.” Aiming to genuinely connect with and honour Latin musical cultures more broadly, she faithfully plays to homegrown vallenato on the pleading “No Puedo Vivir Sin Él” and reaches for cumbia villera on “Cuando Me Muera Te Olvido”. Decidedly Caribbean forms like bachata and dembow feature on “Amiga Mía” with Greeicy and “Un Gatito Me Llamó”, respectively. Her fusions spark joy as well, combining New York City’s sexy drill with Brazilian baile funk on “Bandida Entrenada” and embracing tropical pop on bilingual standout “Papasito”. And while Latin Afrobeats is essentially its own active subgenre at this point, she holds space for herself within it on the somewhat mysterious “Verano Rosa” featuring Feid. None of this means that KAROL’s given up on reggaetón, of course. She sprinkles in a gratifying amount of it throughout, beginning with the poppy perreo of “LATINA FOREVA” and continuing on deeper cuts like “Tu Perfume” and the Mariah Angeliq reunion “FKN Movie”. Elsewhere, as on “Se Puso Linda”, that familiar polyrhythm operates more like a texture than a driver, leaving room for her femme-forward storytelling to shine. The sheer power of her relatable lyricism is hard to deny as well, from the character-driven world-building of “Ivonny Bonita” to the romantic mischievousness of “Si Antes Te Hubiera Conocido”. As for the album’s title, she explains the inspiration. “For this one, I was feeling like there’s a lot of congas in the songs,” she says. “A lot—like, I think the main character is the congas. That sound is super tropical. <i>Coqueta para nosotros</i> is this flirty girl that is, like, super secure of herself, so I just add ‘tropical’ at the beginning, and I got this new name for my album that, I think, expressed perfectly the world that we are in.”
