Shakira’s ‘Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran’: Bye-bye, Piqué; hello, G-spot

At midnight on Friday, March 22, Shakira released her 12th studio album, Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran (Women No Longer Cry) almost seven years after El Dorado, featuring 16 tracks, nine of them new. Expectations are running high, not only from a musical point of view as an artist who has evolved enormously throughout her career, but also from a personal angle.

In the last couple of years, the Colombian has lived through a traumatic separation from soccer star Gerard Piqué after 11 years together, at the end of which he started seeing a woman 22 years her junior. Shakira left Barcelona with her two sons, Sasha and Milan, to settle in Miami, U.S. And her emotional journey is expressed with a cathartic touch in some of the album’s tracks, especially in the famous BZRP Music Sessions Vol. 53 that she released with Argentine producer Bizarrap in January 2023 and that delves deeply into her marriage break-up.

The only new track on the album that dwells on the same theme is Última, in which she sings in Spanish, “I lost my love halfway, how did you get tired of something so genuine? Don’t try to convince me, I beg you, it’s already decided, we are left with what we have learned. You wanted to go out and I wanted to stay with you at home, you wanted to devour the world and I just wanted to have you. Even your friends didn’t mix with mine, it was easier to mix oil and water. You say that I made you feel that nothing ever reached me and that for me everything was too little, insufficient. So you went away and left me an empty space here in my bed.”

But most of the new tracks do not carry the same emotional pain. The allusions are not to Piqué, but to a new Shakira, a fun performer who is looking to the future, collaborates with friends and tries out new sounds and lyrics.

In general, the album Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran is full of hope. Shakira starts with Cardi B in Puntería, a summery, pop song, featuring perhaps the raciest lyrics of her entire career: “Your biceps turn me on, I never have to guide you, you always reach my G-spot.” Another collaboration is the second track, La Fuerte in which she hooks up again with Bizarrap, making it one of the most awaited songs on the album. On it, she sings “I would be lying if I said that seeing photos with you doesn’t hurt” and “I deleted your number. But why? If I already know it, I won’t forget you no matter how much it seems I have.” But despite the lyrics, the tone and style do not seem to be mourning the death of a relationship, but rather putting it behind her and turning the page.

The tone is the same when it comes to her collaboration with Rauw Alejandro for the fourth track, Cohete, a classic duet and more pop than Latin. “Baby, I just long to be with you, to love each other in some corner and devour each other without any complications, there is no greater pleasure than touching you, no one like you makes me flow. I don’t want the moon, I don’t want to go to Mars, I just want to make you come for me.” The fifth track is also a collaboration, this time with the Texan regional Mexican band Grupo Frontera, called Entre Paréntesis, and is another of the singer’s most personal songs: “You can tell when you want to, but when you don’t, you can tell even more. You don’t need to pretend that you put the end in brackets.” When the group introduces her at the end of the song, they call her Shakira, the shewolf and she closes with her classic howl.

The same happens with her four solo tracks, such as Tiempo Sin Verte — “Tell me if I was clumsy, you, a man of a certain delicacy who never took my complaints well and I demanded a little more than I should have;” and Cómo, Dónde y Cuándo, the most reminiscent of the old and longed-for Shakira, in which she talks about how time “flies when you spend it well,” and that “what matters is with whom.” She goes onto sing: “There is no one honest anymore, only the drunks in the bars. I saw that the past is a zero to the left, it is only the future that is remembered, I took off what was weighing me down and now I feel strong.” Nassau is also about a new love and wanting to get lost with them “on an island with no signal:” though she says, “I’m afraid of another disappointment, I don’t want to get hurt but you already opened my heart.” These are mostly lyrics along the lines of those that the Colombian has been singing for more than 30 years, but with an eye to the future. On this album, Shakira makes it very clear: women no longer cry.

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