Just over a year after Tropicoqueta, Karol G returns with a record that is entirely detached from the Caribbean aesthetic of that project and of her current tour. We don’t know if this was done to sustain interest in the tour or to renew Karol G’s presence on global charts, but the album looks as if it were assembled quickly and on the fly, with all that entails.
The album arrives after Karol G’s split with Feid (“the pink summer turned into winter”), and No me arrepiento de sentir tanto is built around a narrative arc of grieving that failed relationship. Although the album opens empowered with the exciting Brazilian funk of ‘Te Llevo To’, the emotional journey shifts toward an increasingly melancholic tone until it reaches ‘Después de ti’, where Carolina sings with all the sorrow “after you my life ended.” She is joined by Greg Gonzalez, from Cigarettes After Sex, in the beautiful ballad that we first heard a few weeks ago.
Without the internal coherence or the overarching vision of some of her other records, ‘No me arrepiento de sentir tanto’ isn’t the kind of album you listen to in order to form a global perspective, but rather to uncover individual gems. The bubbly synths of ‘Maybe’ stand out at the start; later, the lullaby ‘Final Feliz’ would come off quite pretty even without Oklou’s production—though it’s quite noticeable; and ‘Bby Wow’, with Rusowsky and Judeline, is a fresh take on Nina Sky’s famous ‘Move Ya Body’, in a breezy beach vibe.
But the overall feeling is one of familiarity, and even the most substantial collaborations don’t stand out too much. Drake is amusing singing in Spanish on ‘Ahí’, but the chorus of this track can’t be more swoon-worthy. And although ‘Still’, featuring Bruno Mars, is a lovely dream-pop piece, as a lighter ballad it feels fairly obvious. Equally, the umpteenth Selena homage in a cumbia, ‘Alguien que te amaba’, has returned the composition to Pete Astudillo, Quintanilla’s habitual songwriter, but it remains just another generic cumbia.
Although none of the tracks on ‘No me arrepiento de sentir tanto’ is catastrophic, some ideas could have been developed more fully. ‘Eclipse’, as a ballad, seems like the usual piano sketch before it’s produced into something grand, since Karol uses the same flow for it as for all her reggaetón tracks. And ‘Con quién andará?’ already leans heavily on sampling Jeanette, but the same concept has yielded better, less obvious results in other recent songs.
It’s ironic that the track with the most potential is precisely the one Karol didn’t want on the record, ‘For You My Lova’. The hook “a mí me sobran las ganas, a ti te sobra la ropa” doesn’t really fit the album’s narrative arc, although one could argue that within the mourning there is room for a fling. The song’s almost Christmas-like synths and the reggaeton beat form a solid Caribbean club number. In its own way, ‘Matadora’ is worse—it’s enjoying some success, but as reggaeton it couldn’t be more standard.
Without a clear immediate hit like ‘Si antes te hubiera conocido’, and without the collaborations managing to stand out notably, Karol G delivers a solid record, with a handful of redeemable tracks and the haunting ballad ‘Después de ti’ as its main discovery. Yet at the same time, it revisits the notion of a concept album that isn’t truly conceptual and falls short of gathering a substantial portion of the best she has recorded.
