Tropicoqueta

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.