Shakira Comes Back Swinging With ‘Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran’

Suzy Exposito
·6 min read
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Shakira - Credit: JAUME DE LAIGUANA*
Shakira - Credit: JAUME DE LAIGUANA*

Since 2022, Shakira’s personal life has publicly unfolded like an engrossing telenovela that just won’t resolve. The saga began in June of that year, when the Grammy-winning Colombian superstar announced the end of her 11-year romance with the Catalan soccer player, and father of her two children, Gerard Piqué. Despite taking a civil tone in a press release issued that summer, she came firing back in 2023 with a tabloid-ready diss track, detailing their breakup (and Piqué’s infidelity) in excruciating detail: the electro-pop atomic bomb “BZRP Music Sessions #53,”recorded with the stellar Argentine producer Bizarrap.

This track appears on Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, Shakira’s final kiss goodbye to the chapter of her life. Translated to “Women No Longer Cry,” it is the singer-songwriter’s first studio album since the release of her 2017 LP, El Dorado — and a fierce, unfiltered bounce back from years spent inundated by writers’ block and heartache. “While writing each song I was rebuilding myself,” Shakira said in a press statement. “While singing them, my tears transformed into diamonds, and my vulnerability into strength.”

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Since Shakira dropped pop-reggaetón gold in El Dorado, music from Latin America has scaled commercial heights once thought to be unfathomable in the United States. In the subsequent years of reggaetón’s peak global prominence, Colombia alone has produced many acts that have upended the anglophone supremacy in pop music, including J Balvin, Maluma and Karol G. Puerto Rican trap maestro Bad Bunny outran them all — then helped clear the way for his collaborators, Mexican acts like Natanael Cano and Grupo Frontera, to take their rightful place on the world stage.

One might think that this crowded Latin music landscape could threaten Shakira’s relevance. But in 2020, at her historic Super Bowl halftime show with J.Lo, she rolled out all the stops: she stirred her hips, banged the drums, and cranked out the opening riffs of Led Zeppelin’s “Kashmir” on guitar. (Just in case you forgot she could play the axe.) Then, upon winning her MTV Vanguard Award in 2023, she belly-danced while brandishing knives, and got Taylor Swift headbanging in the crowd.

Let Las Mujeres be her testament: Shakira taught Latin music’s new wave everything they need to know about maintaining star power. And just as Gloria and Emilio Estefán welcomed Shakira into their Miami home to help walk her through crossover success — first with her 1998 rock album Dónde Están Los Ladrones?, then with her first English-language record, 2001’s Laundry Service — Shakira uses Las Mujeres to share her massive spotlight with a diverse slate of artists, songwriters and producers who studied from her playbook.

Opening with an assist from her longtime fan, Grammy-winning rapper Cardi B — “I don’t care if she wants me to meow, I’ll do it,” said the Bronx MC in an interview — Shakira gets straight to the point with the nu-disco radio candy of “Puntería.” She serenades a dastardly Cupid in Spanish, rueing the wreckage he’s caused in her life: “Tu tiene buena puntería,” or “You have great aim.”

Shakira also taps the well of Latin songwriters and producers who’ve risen along with their collaborators. Tainy and Albert Hype, producers for Bad Bunny, lend a haunted tropical feel on “Nassau” and “Tiempo Sin Verte.” Mr. Naisgai, right-hand man to Puerto Rican space balladeer Rauw Alejandro, gives “Cohete” a crystalline dance-pop luster. Before Shakira worked with ASCAP-winning songwriter Keityn, he wrote “Tusa” for Karol G.

Bizarrap, who mixed Shakira’s dance tracks “Vol. 53” and “La Fuerte,” formulated his own EDM fusion genre with his BZRP Music Sessions YouTube series, in which pop stars and rappers get to live out their Ibiza fantasies in his studio. With such a potent arsenal of Latin talents on Las Mujeres, DJ Tïesto’s big room remix of Bizarrap’s masterpiece feels not like a grand finale, but a trip down memory lane.

The moody rockera of Shakira’s Nineties resurface for a spell in her free-spirited guitar ballad, “Cómo, Dónde y Cuándo.” She sighs angstily in Spanish, “There’s as much lying in the cities/As there is trash in the seas/No one honest is left/Only drunkards in the bars” — giving the alt girls just one fix of the devastating verses and thorny riffs we came to love in classic songs like “Inevitable.”

Shakira dusts off her cowboy boots on not one, but two música mexicana collaborations; her first since her dalliance with mariachi on 1998’s “Ciega, Sordomuda.” She gets vulnerable with the Texan players Grupo Frontera on “(Entre Parentesís),” a dejection cumbia that calls to mind her love-triangle-themed 2001 track “Objection (Tango).” She gets even on “El Jefe,” a hot-footed corrido with Fuerza Regida; told from the perspective of Shakira’s nanny Liliana Melgar, who Piqué allegedly fired without severance; the song draws attention to the plight of domestic workers and the people who exploit them. “You have everything to be a millionaire/Expensive tastes/The mindset,” quips the She Wolf in Spanish, her claws fully out. “You just lack the salary.”

Out of the 15 tracks, seven have already been released since 2022, limiting the number of surprises and headline-grabbing moments with the record’s release. For example, “TQG” — the venomous duet Shakira recorded with pop-reggaetón idol Karol G — already appeared on the junior singer’s hit record Mañana Será Bonito, and won the pair of Parceras a Latin Grammy for best urban fusion/performance in 2023. But stocking the album with proven tracks does beat pulling cheap gimmicks for virality, like another barely-Spanglish single with a problematic American, or waiting until 2025 to serve us a microwaved, 20-year anniversary remix of “Hips Don’t Lie.”

Las Mujeres is a grab-bag of pop genre fusions, yet Shakira manages to hold court in every song with her incisive and enduring songcraft. She could have easily gone the rest of her life without releasing another album, instead flexing her ubiquity in single after single for eternity. But an artist with a legacy like Shakira’s, on par with anglophone pop titans Taylor Swift and Beyoncé, should get to define her own eras accordingly.

In Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran, Shakira finally gets to turn the page on these tempestuous past two years, and reintroduce herself–not as Shakira the soccer mom, nor Shakira the heartbroken–but Shakira fucking Mebarak, international pop icon and undefeated champ.

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