Shakira’s “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” — her first album in seven years, released on Friday — has all the ingredients to be a downright explosive comeback. After splitting from the retired soccer star Gerard Piqué in 2022, she released a diss track directed at him and his new girlfriend. Fans reeled, and Shakira enjoyed her biggest commercial success in years.
But all those elements — an icon reveling in her legacy, a media-commanding breakup narrative and commercial clout — can’t compensate for uninspired music. This album lacks what has long made Shakira a daring artist: her devotion to sonic eclecticism that cuts against the pop landscape’s typical riskless pablum.
Shakira knows how to concoct genre-bending bangers. Her first English record borrowed from Nirvana’s guitar riffs. The Wyclef Jean collaboration “Hips Don’t Lie” has a reggaeton beat and a sampled salsa intro. And there may never be a World Cup song that tops the Soca-infused “Waka Waka.” Her transnational sound can sometimes feel more like mélange than cohesion, but more often, Shakira’s go-for-broke attitude captivates.
On this album, her maximalist approach to genre is channeled into collaborations with a new generation of Latin hitmakers who have taken over pop music in the past few years. When Shakira crossed over to Anglo audiences in the early 2000s, she carved a path for artists like Karol G and Rauw Alejandro. Now she’s bringing in her descendants to help turn her “pain into productivity.”
Unfortunately, even Shakira’s collaborators cannot lift her tracks to electrifying heights. From the disco-pop “Cohete,” which lusts for new passion, to the slow-drip reggaeton “TQG,” which boasts about postbreakup self-love, many tracks are devoid of Shakira’s typical interplay between sound and word. That’s why it’s particularly telling that her new album takes its name from the lyric “Las mujeres ya no lloran; las mujeres facturan” (“Women don’t cry anymore; they cash in”). The album promised to be an opus on catharsis and perseverance. Instead, it relies on the safety of bankability.
At her sharpest, Shakira can write poetic, oddball lyrics and play with the musical zeitgeist to create timelessness. An example is “Inevitable,” her 1998 grunge-y ballad about letting go of toxic love. It’s a live-show mainstay because her audience still loves the way the acoustic confessional verses burst into the raucous, raw chorus.
But this time, Shakira doesn’t seem to aim for emotional sharpness. Instead of transcending the zeitgeist, she’s allowed herself to fade into the most boring version of the pop scene. The she-wolf is nowhere to be found.
