Karol G’s Songs Conquered the World. On a New LP, with guests including Shakira and Romeo Santos., She Reveals Herself
Mañana Será Bonito,” the Colombian pop superstar’s fourth album, traces her adventures in (and out) of love, with guests including Shakira and Romeo Santos.
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 in a video chat from Medellín, Colombia, 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 the end of a romance they had made public with a 2019 duet, “Secreto,” that has since 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 Sєx with an ex. But eventually, she found herself writing wary love songs and counting her blessings. Just a few weeks before the album’s Feb. 24 release, 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,” she said from her office in her hometown, where she had just returned to meet her sister’s newborn.
Karol G, born Carolina Giraldo Navarro, was wearing an oversized white hoodie, one of 100 that she has decorated by hand for a limited-edition merch sale. Her hair, which has changed color for each album and tour cycle — with her fans attending concerts in matching wigs — was the bold red she unveiled in recent videos.
“The album is more Carolina than Karol G,” she said. “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.”
She admitted to prerelease jitters. “Right now, I notice that artists are trying very hard to find a concept, to be very experimental,” she said. “I love that. And that’s a good way to do art. But the concept of this album is just me being me. I really didn’t want people to feel it was like very simple, or just normal. But then we put up the announcement of my album, and there’s already more than 80 million views on Instagram. Now I’m stressed because I think that expectations are very high.”
“Mañana Será Bonito” is primed to be a blockbuster in the wake of Karol G’s 2021 album, “KG0516.” That LP included her billion-streaming 2019 collaboration with Nicki Minaj, “Tusa,” and her self-mythologizing 2020 “BicH๏τa,” a word Karol G coined to turn “bicH๏τe” — Puerto Rican slang for a drug kingpin — into a feminine noun for, as she says, “a boss bitch,” a Sєxy and powerful woman.
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