(RCA)
Despite a hit diss track so withering it affected the stock market and enlivening turns from Cardi B and leading regional Mexican musicians, the Colombian’s wan 12th album washes out her adventurous spirit
The cover of Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran features a closeup shot of Shakira crying, her tears turning into diamonds as they run down her face. It’s a neat summation of relatively recent developments in the singer’s career. Her 2023 single Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol 53 transformed the toxic fallout from her breakup with footballer Gerard Piqué into one of her biggest ever hits. Within days of release, it was the most streamed track in the world and had broken the record for the number of YouTube views for a Latin American song. It was so huge, it apparently affected the stock market. “You traded a Ferrari for a Twingo,” she railed, “you traded a Rolex for a Casio” – and, incredibly, both Renault and Casio’s share prices dropped.
Moreover, the cover suggests that there’s more where that came from, that Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran is Shakira’s big breakup album – her Blood on the Tracks, her Here, My Dear – a development that might cause long-term observers of her career to prick up their ears. Her arrival on the international stage with 2001’s Laundry Service was one of 00s pop’s more cheering events. Here was a 24-year-old Colombian who seemed to have a completely unique approach to being a pop star. She proffered mainstream bangers and AOR ballads alongside musical experiments off-the-wall enough to make you wonder how they’d got past reception at a major record label: Gregorian chants, surf guitars, bursts of music hall oompah and homages to Led Zeppelin. Her lyrics were so odd that some observers patronisingly suggested their author had a shaky grasp of English, but a quick scan of their Spanish-language equivalents revealed she was using exactly the same weird metaphors and imagery in her native tongue. It was all hugely entertaining, until the commercial underperformance of 2009’s She Wolf in the US seemed to rattle her: Shakira’s albums have been getting less idiosyncratic and more dreary ever since. Perhaps the hell-hath-no-fury mood here might inspire her to recover her sense of daring: after all, a woman who expresses her feelings about her ex’s mother by allegedly putting a lifesize model of a witch directly outside her home doesn’t seem minded to meekly curry favour.
