Final April, Colombian pop star Karol G teased the arrival of her fourth studio album with the delicately layered “Provenza,” some of the beautiful and evocative Latin songs lately. Within the visible, shot on the rugged Spanish island of Lanzarote, a gaggle of girls has enjoyable by the ocean, their worries washed away by a sudden summer time rainstorm.
This message of bucolic self-acceptance comes with the identical sort of relaxed, magnetic panache that Karol G has specialised in since she emerged as a frontrunner of the booming urbano music scene in 2017. The identical lush feeling knowledgeable her 2019 megahit “Tusa,” a collaboration with Nicki Minaj that furthered Latin pop’s mainstream attraction, and it’s on the emotional middle of the sprawling Mañana Será Bonito, her strongest effort so far.
Auto-Tuned or not, Karol’s voice is open and heat, blessed with a laid-back purity that’s uncommon within the raucous urbano area. However it’s not solely the voice that’s stunning, it’s additionally the wistful vitality behind it. Like every world diva price her salt, Karol engineers the fickle phantasm that she’s addressing you, the listener, immediately — whether or not evoking unfulfilled want for a previous lover or compiling an inventory of future erotic delights.
The album begins in epic, post-breakup mode. On opening monitor “Mientras Me Curo Del Cora,” Karol counts her blessings (good well being, a supportive household) and reassures our wounded hearts that it’s OK to really feel unhappy at instances. She finds a supportive sonic accomplice in producer and compatriot Ovy on the Drums, a digital architect capable of inject a way of function into probably the most drained reggaeton again beat. Ovy’s aural world-building is nimble and funky, kinetic and futuristic. On the splendid “Cairo” — full with a video shot on the pyramids of Egypt — he retains the metallic but velvet-like rhythm transferring inexorably ahead, resulting in a bombastic outro of sheer EDM delight.
Not the whole lot works right here. A duet with Quevedo, “Pero Tú,” sounds unusually disjointed. Karol’s incursion into música Mexicana is a distracting detour, and her much-anticipated monitor with Colombian icon Shakira, “TQG,” feels underwhelming, particularly because it arrives solely weeks after the media circus that surrounded Shakira’s huge new monitor with Bizarrap.
However the songs hit their bold heights most of the time. A fiery dembow with Justin Quiles and Angel Dior, “Ojos Ferrari,” is reckless and addictive; the autobiographical “Carolina” floats in a honeyed layer of Afro-beats smoothness; and the transient, encyclopedic musical references all through the LP (a nod to “Don’t Fear Be Glad” on the opening monitor; an homage to the salsa anthem “La Cura,” by Frankie Ruiz, on the bouncy “Amargura”) add context to her improvements.
“Mañana será bonito,” Karol coos on the final monitor. Tomorrow can be fairly. At this time is fairly nice, too, and this LP is a testomony to her place as one in every of Latin music’s true originals.