Put some respect on Karol G’s name. Over the past two years, the Colombian superstar became the first Latina to headline a global stadium tour for her acclaimed 2023 album Mañana será bonito and its companion, Bichota Season, which transformed heartbreak into top-tier perreo. Her career spans nearly a decade of award wins and collaborations with nearly every major artist in old- and new-school urbano, Latin trap, R&B, and hip-hop. She even has her own Bratz doll.
Mañana será bonito and Bichota Season were sensitive and diaristic, recorded as she healed from a public breakup and decorated with Sharpie hearts and mermaid stickers. But they also showcased her artistic growth, using hope as fuel for high-octane urbano anthems. To follow up this monumental success, Karol G’s new album Tropicoqueta roots itself in urbano’s analog beginnings: Live instrumentation and Latina bombshells who captivated audiences with their confidence. Less drum packs, less clothing, more congas. “Más buena, más dura, más level.”
The essence of Tropicoqueta is the backpacking, Próxima Estación energy of “Viajando por el Mundo,” featuring cherished polyglot Manu Chao. Sidestepping urbano in favor of folkloric heart, Karol G ventures across Latin America with soul and precision. There are no attempts at genre reinvention; this album honors Colombian, Puerto Rican, Panamanian, Dominican, Mexican, Brazilian, and Cuban rhythms by delivering them at their purest. It’s a tribute to the music that taught her how to feel before it taught her how to perform. Tropicoqueta isn’t just Karol G’s most expansive body of work—it’s her most researched.
In form and concept, the album directly traces Colombia’s musical lineage and the roles of Latin women in the global entertainment industry. Colombia’s mainstream music history begins in 1934 with the founding of Discos Fuentes in Cartagena. While Eurocentric sounds dominated early radio, visionary label founder Don Antonio Fuentes set out to shape the nation’s sonic identity by scouting the coasts and countryside for Black, Indigenous, and rural talent. His label championed Afro-Caribbean sounds from la costa like cumbia, vallenato, merengue, and salsa, along with those of the campesinos like parrandera and bambuco. In 1961, it broke through with the first volume of the highly successful compilation series 14 Cañonazos Bailables (14 Canon Shots for Dancing), which united a variety of genres under the umbrella of “tropical” music.
Karol channels this musical revolution in tracks like “Cuando Me Muera Te Olvido,” a technocumbia bathed in cosmic synths and echo. The way she draws out the word “cumbia” is a stamp of authenticity, transporting me to a bustling banquet-hall dancefloor with my primas. Sampling George Michael’s 1984 hit “Careless Whisper,” Karol continues the custom of morphing English-language pop songs into unexpectedly great cumbias. (Was this an Uno Reverse for Wham!’s “Club Tropicana?”) Then there’s “No Puedo Vivir Sin Él,” a stunning, accordion-laced vallenato where Karol’s paisa accent feels right at home. Steeped in melodrama and misty-eyed melancholia, it’s the kind of song that turns a bottle of guaro into a microphone. At just the mere thought of losing her lover, Karol sings, “Yo prefiero morir,” placing a gun to her heart. Oh, to be loved, Colombianly.
Though the Cañonazos compilations primarily featured male salseros (like Joe Arroyo and Fruko y sus Tesos), cumbiamberos (Pedro Laza and Gustavo Quintero), and vallenateros, their album covers were eroticized pinup imagery. Leading up to the release of Tropicoqueta, Karol G shared some of these historical covers via Instagram, as if to ask: What if the women on the Cañonazos album covers had performed the songs? What were their stories? Posing pinup-style atop conga drums, she uses the Tropicoqueta artwork to answer.
The album’s historicism goes beyond strictly musical references. Last week, Karol brought iconic Cuban journalist Cristina Saralegui out of retirement to film a special episode of her eponymous talk show, which hosted the biggest Latin musicians from the ’90s until 2010. She name-dropped @ficheraz, an archival project dedicated to preserving the fascinating history of Latin, Caribbean, and diasporic showgirls. Starting as early as the 1940s and continuing into the ’80s, these vedettes—dazzling leading ladies who danced, sang, acted, and even clowned all within one show—took control of their own sensuality through cabaret, burlesque, and film. In the video for “Papasito,” Karol dances Brazilian lambada on a chintzy set reflecting this era of Latina entertainers. The album’s only song partially in English, this galloping, flirty technomerengue evokes archetypal vedettes like Iris and Lourdes Chacón, muses who spoke to international audiences with over-the-top charm and enigmatic, at times absurd, performances. The sumptuous, smouldering bachata of “Ivonny Bonita” embodies these baddies of decades past: bold rumberas who, like Karol G, fell in love with the stage.
You could follow just about every song here into another musical genre or historical tangent. Even the contemporary-sounding songs have lineage, like the slow-whining, old-school flows of “Dile Luna,” an acknowledgment of how much Afro-Panamanians like Eddy Lover have done for reggaeton. Mariah Angeliq singing, “Ya tu sabes quienes son, en un makinon” (“You already know who it is, in a huge machine”) is a shoutout to Puerto Rico. Karol also references the legacies of several Mexican it-girls and artists, recreating Rossy Mendoza’s glittering green two-piece in the “LATINA FOREVA” video and opening the album with a casual, honey-toned duet with Thalía, the “Queen of Latin Pop,” singing her classic “Piel Morena.” Later, Marco Antonio Solís, formerly of Los Bukis, conjures sweeping novela imagery with “Coleccionando Heridas”—picture a male protagonist riding a white horse on a beach at sunset, half-buttoned shirt rippling in the breeze. But the real showstopper is “Ese Hombre Es Malo,” where Karol’s vocals soar over a breathtaking 57-piece mariachi symphony.
With Tropicoqueta, Karol G delivers an album for people who love Latin music and show business as much as she does. Her ambitious vision is shaped by those who’ve come before her and dedicated to the communities who lift her up. The album’s studied combination of traditional and modern sounds underlines what makes today’s urbano so addictive: The cultural references that the Latin diaspora recognize so easily. The way we know which steps to dance within a song’s first five seconds. “¿Será que se quedó el amor en otros tiempos?” (“Could it be that love has stayed in the past?”) Karol asks in “Coleccionando Heridas.” Her fifth album asserts that it’s inside of us at all times, if only you know where to look.
The Ed Sheeran people remember from the early days, the one who got into drunken fights and wrote heartfelt love songs to make up for showing up late from the pub, would probably have turned Play into a drinking game. Every time he uses an explosion metaphor, you take a shot. If he brings up the stars, you finish your Guinness. If you are bold enough, you can add references to heaven into the mix, though I would not recommend it. Some quick back-of-the-napkin math suggests that by the 20-minute mark of Play, you would already be 13 shots deep.
Whatever you think of Sheeran, he has never come across this uninspired before. In the first decade of his career, he managed to use his “average guy” persona to hide a relentless drive for success, a quality he shared with his friend and collaborator Taylor Swift. He started with “The A Team,” an acoustic debut single about homelessness and drug addiction, and spun it into a series of albums filled with dependable wedding staples. Along the way, he leaned into flashy but practical genre experiments that produced high-stakes hits like “Shape of You,” “I Don’t Care,” and “Bad Habits.”
Sheeran’s most clever trick was realizing that his very everyday personal life gave him the freedom to take musical risks that would have been harder for other stars. He married his high school sweetheart, keeps close with his childhood friends, and has even joked about once soiling himself onstage. That kind of everyman image allowed him to dabble in grime, dancehall, and even release a song with Cardi B where she claimed that “Ed got a little jungle fever.” He never seemed like a jet-setting, trend-chasing multimillionaire. Instead, he was the relatable guy who could skim through Latin trap, hip-hop, and folk pop and somehow turn it all into hits.
By his own words, Sheeran no longer has that same fire. He told The New York Times, “Pop is a young person’s game and you have to really, really be in it and want it. I’ve found myself stepping back more and more and being like, actually, I’m really valuing family.” While this might seem like a quiet retreat from the pop machine, it undercuts the work of artists like Swift and Madonna, who have fought to prove that pop is not just for the young. And more importantly, it rings hollow when you listen to Play, which feels like a retreat after 2023’s and Autumn Variations, his first studio albums since 2011, not to top the Billboard 200.
For someone as fixated on stats as Sheeran, this fact must sting. Early in the Play, he even says he wants to “keep this Usain pace.” Yet you can also hear the exhaustion throughout the record, where he goes back to his two safest formulas, romantic wedding songs and “global” pop bangers, without much of the spark or warmth that made him such a draw in the first place. The result is a clash between lingering ambition and a lack of effort, leaving Sheeran sounding like the one thing he never wanted to be seen as: a calculating pop star driven more by the need to hold onto his status than by genuine love of music.
That shift was not inevitable. The first track, “Opening,” is actually one of the most interesting moments on the album. It starts with a soft acoustic intro before veering into some of Sheeran’s weakest attempts at rap: “In this world, there’s no relaxin’/I’ve been here since migraine skankin’/Never been cool, but never been a has-been.” His awkward rhymes and the sing-song delivery make it tough to listen to, but lyrically, it is revealing. He admits he may have “lost his way,” worries that his “career’s in a risky place,” and references fallings-out, though he never says exactly what they were. It sets up the possibility of an album where Sheeran might really reflect on his place in the music industry and in his own life.
That is not what Play turns out to be. Instead, when he circles back to those ideas, it is through heavy-handed sentiment. On the stomping sing-along “Old Phone,” he discovers a decade-old device full of texts and photos, including messages from exes and friends who have since passed away. His conclusion that maybe it is best left in the past feels obvious and flat. When he sings about the “overwhelming sadness” of friends he has lost, it comes across more like a diary entry than honest introspection. He doesn’t push deeper into what those feelings mean. For someone who doesn’t currently own a phone, Sheeran misses the irony that most people’s phones today are already crammed with both love and hate. By the bridge, he has tucked the phone away again, as if to wrap the idea neatly without exploring it further.
“Old Phone” at least tries something slightly new, but elsewhere Sheeran falls back on old patterns. On “Camera,” he revisits the reassuring-but-bland style of his One Direction co-write “Little Things,” reminding his partner she is beautiful despite insecurities. Then he flips the concept of his 2015 hit “Photograph,” singing, “I don’t need a camera to capture this moment/I’ll remember how you look tonight for all my life.” The effect is less touching and more like a tired echo of Eric Clapton’s “Wonderful Tonight.”
The box-checking continues with songs like “In Other Words,” which feels like a weaker version of “Perfect,” and “The Vow,” which recalls “Thinking Out Loud.” Then there is “A Little More,” a bitter breakup track where Sheeran sings, “I can’t call you crazy/’Cause you could be diagnosed.” It reminds listeners of two things: he struggles to show empathy toward exes in his writing, and his attempts at humor rarely land.
The bright spots come when Sheeran leans into sounds outside his usual palette. “Azizam,” which takes its name from an Iranian term meaning “my darling,” is the most vibrant song here, full of energy and rhythm, with producer Ilya weaving in traditional Iranian instruments. “Sapphire,” a collaboration with Punjabi star Arijit Singh, and “Symmetry,” which builds on a lively tabla rhythm from Jayesh Kathak, are heavy-handed but carried by Sheeran’s genuine enthusiasm. The excitement in his delivery recalls the risk-taking that once made songs like “South of the Border” so oddly compelling. With Shah Rukh Khan, India’s biggest film icon, appearing in the “Sapphire” video, these songs are positioned to make a real impact.
On these tracks, Sheeran finally sounds engaged. He has said he finished the album in Goa, and these moments feel alive enough that you wish he had built the whole project around them. Still, the timing feels strange. Just one day before the album’s release, more than 110,000 far-right protesters marched through London, railing against immigration. Against that backdrop, Sheeran’s lighthearted collaborations with Indian and Iranian musicians feel disconnected, like escapist gestures at a time when such apolitical optimism already feels outdated.
The record closes with “Heaven,” one of its better songs, but also one that highlights Sheeran’s ongoing issues. On one level, it nods to a recurring critique of his work: even though he won both of his copyright lawsuits in 2023 and 2024, many listeners still hear echoes of other songs in his writing, and “Heaven” sounds a lot like Jason Mraz’s “I’m Yours” or Charli XCX’s “Everything Is Romantic.” On another level, its mix of light percussion and straightforward lyrics strikes a balance between the adventurousness he claims he has outgrown and the clichés that drag down much of the album. But then, as if unable to help himself, he falls back on familiar imagery: “Chemicals bursting, exploding/As every second’s unfolding.” Which, if you are playing the drinking game, means another double shot.
