Karol G Reveals Herself, In (and Out) of Love
“I’m being really open with this album, and that gets me a little bit scared, because I’m not a perfect human,” Karol G said about her new album, “Mañana Será Bonito.”
Karol G, a global pop star from Colombia, said she wrote 60 songs, maybe more, for her new album, “Mañana Será Bonito” (“Tomorrow Will Be Beautiful”); eventually she winnowed them down to 17.
The first ones, she recalled, were full of “anger, sadness, bad love, toxic relationships.” They reflected the fallout of her 2021 breakup with the Puerto Rican rapper and singer Anuel AA, after a romance they had made public with a 2019 duet, “Secreto,” that has been streamed more than a billion times.
Karol G, 32, wrote about feeling betrayed, about temptations and doubts, about partying away the pain, about no-strings sex with an ex. But eventually, she found herself writing wary love songs and counting her blessings. Just a few weeks before the album’s release last month, she was wondering if she had been too candid.
“I’m being really open with this album, and that gets me a little bit scared, because I’m not a perfect human,” said Karol G, born Carolina Giraldo Navarro.
“The album is more Carolina than Karol G,” she added. “Personal things that I had inside me, I was just letting them go in my lyrics. People are going to know about a lot of my personal life with my songs. But I don’t want to have the songs inside me anymore, because I know people can heal a lot of things with music. Writing songs for me is a really good way to heal things that I can’t explain.”
“Mañana Será Bonito” recently became the first Spanish-language album by a woman to be Number One on the Billboard charts. This success follows Karol G’s 2021 album, “KG0516,” which included her billion-streaming 2019 collaboration with Nicki Minaj, “Tusa,” and her self-mythologizing 2020 “Bichota,” a word Karol G coined to turn “bichote” — Puerto Rican slang for a drug kingpin — into a feminine noun for, as she says, “a boss bitch,” a sexy and powerful woman.
Her new slang caught on. “‘Bichota’ became a movement,” she said.
The core of Karol G’s music is the loping beat of reggaeton. But her songs replace the genre’s usual rapping with inviting pop melodies, delivered in her clear, teasing voice. Instead of reggaeton’s machismo, she offers cheerful, forthrightly sex-positive femininity.
With each album, Karol G has reached beyond reggaeton to collaborate with an international array of guests — a sign of Latin pop’s ever-expanding, border-crossing possibilities.
Her 2017 debut album, “Unstoppable,” included duets with Bad Bunny and Quavo (from Migos), and it brought her a 2018 Latin Grammy Award as best new artist. Her popularity has only grown since then, stoked by lusty songs like “Mi Cama” (“My Bed”) and “Punto G” (“G-Spot”). In Latin America, she headlines stadiums.
On “Mañana Será Bonito,” Karol G worked with Finneas (Billie Eilish’s brother and collaborator), the Jamaican dancehall singer Sean Paul, the New York-born bachata singer Romeo Santos, the Dominican dembowsero Angel Dior, and her forerunner as a Colombian superstar, Shakira. She also embraces an elder generation of reggaeton with “Gatúbela” (“Catwoman”), a racy duet with Maldy, a Puerto Rican rapper from the duo Plan B, which released its first album in 2002.
Karol G said that her hybrids and connections are a matter of instinct, not crossover marketing. “For me to go to different styles of music, different genres is not hard, because I have music from everywhere that I really love,” Karol G said.
One song on her new album, “Gucci Los Paños,” (“Gucci Towels”), furiously and profanely rejects an ex-boyfriend’s attempts to get back together. “If we’re going to do a really heartbroken song that needs to sound really angry, for me you have to use Mexican sounds,” she said.
Another of the album’s good-riddance songs is “TGQ,” the duet with Shakira — a pairing Karol G had long hoped for. They had sent each other songs in recent years, but none had seemed exactly right. Now, with Shakira singing openly about her own breakup, Karol G thought they might share another song in which she was “letting a lot of anger go.” When Shakira heard it, Karol G said, “she was, like ‘Oh my God, thank you. Those lyrics are perfectly the way I feel right now.’ ”
The album does not offer a narrative. Framed by two songs calling for hope — “Mientras Me Cura del Cora” (“While My Heart Heals”) and “Mañana Será Bonito” — the track list wanders amid hookups and kiss-offs, heedless excess and cautious infatuation. In “Cairo,” she chides herself that the one-night stand she planned on has led to real affection: “I’m not in love but I’m almost there,” she sings.
“I was going to be really mad about love and everything,” Karol G said. “And at the end of the album, now I’m feeling it again. I used to hate it and now I’m loving it again. So let’s be open to that.”