For Shakira, 2022 was a year of heartbreak. Decades of hit singles and groundbreaking Latin-pop crossovers couldn’t insulate the Colombian pop star from personal upheavals. In the glare of celebrity coupledom, she broke up with the soccer player Gerard Piqué, her partner for 11 years and the father of her two sons, Milan and Sasha. Her father was hospitalized twice for a fall that caused head trauma; he went on to require further brain surgery in 2023.
Shakira was also facing charges of tax evasion in a long-running case disputing whether she had lived primarily in Spain from 2012 to 2014; she declared residency there in 2015. Last November, she settled for a fine of 7.5 million euros (about $8.2 million), citing “the best interest of my kids.” Just days earlier, Shakira had collected the Latin Grammy for song of the year for “Shakira: Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53,” a collaboration with the Argentine producer Bizarrap with wordplay clearly aimed at Piqué and his girlfriend.
The song was one of a string of singles Shakira released that referred directly to the breakup: the sarcastic “Te Felicito” (“I Congratulate You”); the regretful “Monotonía” (“Monotony”); the Bizarrap session, “Acróstico,” a ballad promising her children that she’d stay strong; and “TQG” (“Te Quedó Grande,” roughly translated as “I’m Too Good for You”), a taunting reggaeton duet with the Colombian star Karol G, who had been through her own public breakup. “TQG” has racked up more than a billion streams.
Those songs reappear on Shakira’s first album since 2017, “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” (“Women No Longer Cry”), due Friday. All but one of its tracks deal with romantic ups and (mostly) downs, honed into crisp, tuneful pop structures. The LP continues Shakira’s career-long penchant for pulling together music and collaborators from across the Americas, dipping into rock, electro-pop, trap, Dominican bachata, Nigerian-style Afrobeats and regional Mexican cumbia and polka. Her guests include Cardi B, Ozuna and Rauw Alejandro. Not one of them upstages Shakira, who’s playful or raw as each moment demands.
Shakira spoke about the album from her white-walled kitchen at her home in Miami, where an air fryer sat on the counter behind her; a pet bunny in a pen was at her side. Unlike Barcelona, Miami is a hub of Latin pop where, she said, “I have the feeling I’ll be making a lot more music now.” Wearing a black tank top, with her hair in long blond waves, Shakira spoke happily and volubly about an album that, for her, was “alchemical.” These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
Does the album tell a story? In the first songs, you’re wondering how to hold on to someone. But by the end, you’re pretty angry.
There is a narrative. It’s a conceptual album without it being my initial intention. You know, no one plans on going through a breakup the way I did. And the dissolution of a family — that is probably one of the most painful things a human can experience. But it happened. If life gives you lemons, you make lemonade. That’s what I did with this album — use my own creativity to process my frustration and my anger and my sadness. I transmuted or transformed pain into productivity.
The album title, “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran,” comes from the song that confronts the breakup most specifically: “Bzrp Sessions No. 53”
It was the most direct one. But I started talking about what was happening to me through “Te Felicito” and “Monotonía.” In the video [for “Monotonía”], I come out with this hole in my chest, because that’s exactly the physical feeling that I had when I was going through my loss. I almost felt that people could see through my chest, see what was behind it. But with every song that I wrote, I was rebuilding myself. It was like putting my bones back together. That’s why I decided to go for this title, “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” — “Women No Longer Cry.” Crying itself will always be a mechanism of survival for human beings. It’s an important part of living. And I feel like women today, we don’t need to be told how we’re supposed to heal, how we’re supposed to lick our wounds. We are the ones who have to move on and preserve our species, preserve the survival of our offspring — of the she-wolves that we are.
One of the new songs, “(Entre Paréntesis),” ends with you bringing back the howl from “She Wolf.”
The she-wolf is all over this album. The she-wolf is what helped me rebuild myself. I had my times in which I howled at the moon, I licked my wounds. And I connected to that primal woman inside, to just sing and dance her pain away, to exorcise it. I think that women have this strength and this special intuition — this natural instinct of survival. When we really want to survive a situation, we just have to find that being within ourselves — to protect the pack.
I also found extreme support in women who have been through worse than me and that have taught me amazing lessons. Society has been, for centuries, putting us in a place as victims — since the Inquisition, when they burnt us at the stake. But I think women are rebelling against that. We just have to fight for what we want and heal in whatever way we want. At some point those tears have to transform themselves into tears of triumph.
Did your popularity, your celebrity, help get you through those rough years?
Not the fact of being a celebrity. I not only had to face the dissolution of my family — I had to do it with the journalists at my doorstep, with people talking about it, with me learning stuff from the press myself. It was really extremely painful. But my fans just know me and understand me and forgive my mistakes, and they support me, whatever decisions I make. I get emotional when I talk about it, because I honestly never thought that they would show up the way they showed up. But they have showed me the best version of myself, and they made me believe that I’m worth it and that I should go on. You know, them and my kids have definitely been the biggest help, the biggest support I’ve gotten.
I also had people who turned their backs on me — people who worked for me and betrayed me. And I had to face everything at the same time. And then my dad had a terrible accident that left him compromised neurologically. My dad has always been my best friend, so he wasn’t there to give me his best advice when I needed him the most. So it was a period of extreme pain. Only writing the songs allowed me to rebuild myself.
It’s a lot of changes to go through.
My essence remains the same. I think that deep inside I’m the same little girl from Barranquilla. I’m ruled by the same principles that were ingrained in me since a very early age. But my mind, my opinions, my ideas change. You know, my dogmas, my doctrines. But not my love, my moral principles and my ethics. They’re in this core. They’re preserved in formaldehyde.
Well, what’s in that formaldehyde?
Try to do the right things. Be there for those who I love and who love me. There’s no religion or higher institutional set of rules that guides those principles. It’s just that I want to try to do the right thing, because that’s who I am, and that’s what I want to instill in my kids.
Through the years, you’ve done all sorts of duets and collaborations, and you have many more on this album. How do you decide who gets to make a song with Shakira?
It’s not a premeditated process. I think every song has its own demands. For “Punteria” (“Aiming”), I thought, “How cool would it be to have a woman rapper here?” The only person who came to my mind was Cardi B. I had just met her in Paris and she seemed so nice. So I reached out, I sent her the song, and she jumped on it right away. It was actually an enormous pleasure to work with her. I find her so creative and witty and direct and unapologetically genuine.
You made two brassy songs with regional Mexican-style bands, Grupo Frontera and Fuerza Regida.
Colombia and Mexico have always had really close ties, and it was wonderful to experiment with this genre. One of the best studio sessions that I’ve ever had was with Grupo Frontera. I had just come from surfing in Malibu, and I went to the studio with my hair still wet, and they were there. They came in with this pure, genuine energy. We jammed through this song, and it was just one of the most fun, exhilarating moments I’ve had in the recording studio — a true musician’s moment.
“El Jefe,” the song with Fuerza Regida, isn’t about love or heartbreak — it’s about a worker who’s underpaid and hates his boss.
I wanted to lend my voice for those who don’t have a voice. There’s quite a lot of people who can’t talk about their bosses. And in the video, I brought in this Colombian Paso Fino horse. It has the most amazing trot because it dances to the music, and I got to ride it!
You’ve done a lot of cross-cultural transformations of your songs: tango versions, Bollywood versions.
I like to study cultures. I like to study their ways of expression through art and dance. And I wish I could know how to dance to every single culture in the world. But I do my homework and my research and try to do my own interpretation, because my body can only move in certain ways.
Latin music keeps reaching larger audiences worldwide, and now there are a lot of international, cross-border fusions — something you’ve been doing for decades. Has something changed in recent years?
So, so much has changed and evolved in our industry. When I started to sing in English or to present songs like “Hips Don’t Lie” or “La Tortura” to American radio, there were only a few gatekeepers who would decide what would play. Now, people decide for themselves through socials and through digital platforms. So music has gotten democratized.
When I first started, I had to really struggle in a male-dominated industry in Colombia, in Latin America. I had to go from radio station to radio station, convincing radio station directors, convincing record company executives, convincing journalists. I had to do so much convincing — it was exhausting!
When they used to speak about Colombia, it was only for the drugs. I remember those headlines when I first came out, like an American magazine saying “Shakira is the second biggest export from Colombia.” There was a lot of prejudice, a lot of no-nos, a lot of barriers to break. I was out there in the desert back then, kind of breaking rocks under the hot sun. But I feel proud of the moment that Latin music is living in right now.
You’ve written songs in both English and Spanish. Are they different mindsets?
English is the language that I resort to when I’m in the studio. It’s tech friendly — all the technical terms are in English, so when you’re talking to engineers, when you’re talking to musicians, it’s easier to use English. But Spanish is my first language and will always be my most visceral language.
“Última” feels like one of the most emotionally exposed songs on the album — full of feelings about regret and memories and deciding not to go back.
It was the last song that came on the album, and that’s why I called it “The Last One.” We had all the tracks completed, but I was like, No, no, I can’t close this album. I’m going to choke on this song. This one is stuck here, it’s a cyst, I need to get it out. So I just went in the studio, produced it and wrote it, and I finished it and sang it in one day. And it’s also the last song that I plan on writing about you know who and the one that shouldn’t be named: Voldemort.
