With her Tropitour tour underway, Karol G publishes the album she announced by surprise last week: ‘I don’t regret feeling so much.’ The Colombian had been leaving clues with singles like ‘After you’ or ‘Matadora’, but few expected a complete album to arrive so soon after ‘Tropicoqueta’. Even less, with a list of collaborators of this caliber.
On the one hand there is Drake, who sings in Spanish in reggaeton with Afrobeats touches on ‘Ahí’, one of the great candidates for success on the album. On the other hand, Bruno Mars accompanies Karol in the dream-pop of ‘Still’, a song that she wrote before the American joined the project and that, according to Karol herself, was not conceived “for the market.”
There are more surprise names. Rusowsky and Judeline appear together on ‘BBY WOW’, a very ‘DAISY’ song, although Judeline’s participation goes much further: she appears as a composer on several songs, including the relaxed ‘Happy End’, produced by Oklou. Karol G has explained that he was looking for a slightly more alternative sound than his previous work, and several songs point in that direction, although not all.
In that sense, the taste for Tainy’s production in the opening, ‘You take you to’, stands out; the bubbly synth-pop of ‘Maybe’; or the collaboration with Greg Gonzalez, from Cigarettes After Sex, which closes the album. On the other hand, cuts like ‘Matadora’ or ‘For You My Lova’ approach a much more conventional urban Latin. In fact, Karol has said that he doubted until the last moment whether to include the latter on the album.
Sustained by a narrative arc inspired by his breakup with Feid, ‘I don’t regret feeling so much’ runs through the different phases of emotional grief, from denial to acceptance. One of the key moments is ‘Someone who loved you’, another cumbia in the line of those that Karol has already dedicated to Selena Quintanilla, with the particularity that it has been written by Pete Astudillo, Selena’s historical composer, who had been away from composition for some time.
Combining this search for new nuances with the return to the urban Latin rhythms of the author of ‘Provenza’, which seems to directly inspire another of the songs with the most potential, ‘Drinking Tears’, ‘I don’t regret feeling so much’ works less as a new turn in Karol G’s career than as a compilation of the sounds she has explored in recent years. Among them there is also space for the piano ballad ‘Eclipse’, published just a few days before the eclipse next Monday.
