This article is available in multiple languages. Choose your preferred language to continue.
In Her Skin
Karol G stands alone, in a cavernous and pitch-black room, with a snake crawling up her arm. It might sound like a nightmare scenario for mere mortals, but the Colombian pop superstar is supremely at ease, glittering and gazing intensely with her snake hand aloft, like she’s about to conjure a spell. As she moves—very slowly, with a halo-esque, heavy-looking headpiece spiking up from her honey-dyed hair—the snake seems to move with her, responding to each slight adjustment of her physique. They are in a kind of hypnotic rhythm, slow-dancing together to the muted salsa music —Héctor Lavoe, Willie Colón, Orquesta Guayacán—that’s quietly soundtracking the scene from some faraway speaker.
We’re at a warehouse-sized studio in New York for this issue’s cover shoot, where the renowned Russian German photographer Elizaveta Porodina gives Karol exuberant direction from behind her camera; at one point she yells, “Fuck my life, this is so beautiful!” Someone else gasps. A procession of photo assistants, stylists, production designers, make-up artists are in the room, but there is really only Karol and the snakes——an albino Colombian rainbow boa constrictor and two smaller ones (a black king snake and a red corn snake) show up later in the shoot.
And Karol loves the snakes; she requested them. “I like symbols that everyone misunderstands,” she explains later, after she’s removed the glitter and changed into a white sweatshirt with black cats on it. “For example, people hate the number 13. For me, 13 is my luckiest number. It means that something is dying in you, but you become better. Bad things happen to you because the doors are open, and the world is preparing you for the next big thing—the one that you deserve. People interpret snakes as revenge, kind of an evil element. But for our ancestors, it was like resilience, changing, even eternity. Everything that represents Latinos: eternity, resilience, wisdom, our roots.”
Embracing her Latina roots
It’s a Sunday in early June, and outside the studio, the streets of Manhattan are filled with jubilant boricuas carrying some variation of La Monoestrellada—the one star-flag—in honor of the annual Puerto Rican Day Parade. On the other side of the U.S., the streets of Los Angeles have erupted against ICE’s raids on Latine communities, with peaceful protesters waving Mexican, Colombian, and other Latin American flags in the faces of the National Guardsmen who have been sent to quell them. In many indigenous cultures across Latin America, the snake represents wisdom and rebirth, and sometimes it took the form of gods and goddesses; Karol’s desire to showcase them couldn’t have come at a more pertinent time for the legions of Latines around the world who love her music and find strength in her persona. And on her new album, Tropicoqueta, they will hear themselves reflected back on an album full of her interpretations of classic sounds from across Latin America—one that, she says, is “my most Latina version of myself.”
Karol G is renowned for taking the objectifying motifs of reggaetón and flipping them on their head, transforming them into empowerment songs for strong women just trying to feel themselves in this dusty world. Over the course of five albums, beginning with 2017’s Unstoppable, she has projected confidence and comfort in her own body, a vision of strength that her legions of femme fans can then project themselves onto: La Bichota, a bad-bitch persona she crafted after “bichote,” a Puerto Rican slang term for a big underworld boss.
La Bichota was a response to being underestimated: first as a teen songwriter with a golden voice, whose initial experiences in the late-2000s Medellín music industry were sullied by the controlling advances of a predatory manager. Later, as a woman making reggaeton in the early 2010s, turned away by labels who viewed men as the only bankable practitioners of the genre. She gave up on music a few times, soured on the exploitation and close-mindedness she encountered; she moved to New York to live with her aunt. One day on the subway, though, she legendarily saw an ad for music-business school and decided to throw herself back into her dreams. By 2017, upon the breakout success of her Latin-trap collab “Ahora Me Llama” with fellow emergent star Bad Bunny, it was clear she was a crucial part of a new, more inclusive generation of Latin American pop stars who, just a few years later, would be dominating charts around the world.
The sounds of Tropicoqueta
Karol and I first meet up in late May, so she can play songs from Tropicoqueta for Complex. She is giddy with nerves, a welcome display of normalcy from the often hyper-poised world of popstardom, and her buzzy energy cuts through the intimate atmosphere. We are in a zillion-dollar basement studio in Manhattan that’s so plush—deep pile carpet in cream, giant bean-bag style chairs in white sherpa fur—it feels like we’re ensconced in the soft embrace of a Muppet. Karol, wearing jeans and black platform sandals, says Tropicoqueta’s first single—the snappy, saucy single “Latinas Foreva”—was inspired by the Nuyorican pop duo Nina Sky and reggaetón pioneer Ivy Queen, a tribute to “how, as Latinas, we are loud, we are extroverted, how when we go to a party we are the soul of the party.”
She is the soul of the party, and there is seemingly no underestimating Karol G now: In 2023, with her fourth album, Mañana Será Bonito, she channeled a breakup into a healing process with a variety of genres—reggaetón, dembow, Afrobeats, bachata, Norteño, and more—and used that energy to rocket-fuel herself to stratospheric levels of renown. She broke records, logging a collection of firsts: first Latina to embark on a global stadium tour; first Latina to debut at No. 1 on the Billboard charts for a Spanish language album; Best Música Urbana album at the 2023 Grammy Awards; plus Album of the Year at the Latin Grammys, Premios Lo Nuestro, the Latin American Music Awards, and several more. In Mañana Fue Bonito (Tomorrow Was Beautiful), a Netflix documentary about the Mañana Será Bonito stadium tour, she says that early in her career she even wished, at times, to have been born a man; instead, she spent the intervening years proving that a woman could best them all.
And so it has been a bananas few years for Carolina Giraldo Navarro, the constantly grinding 34-year-old who came up from middle-class Medellín. “The world and universe and God showed me that I can get to places that I never thought I would,” says Karol, her awe palpable. “So now I have my mind going crazy, thinking how far I can get.”
But the months and years after a person reaches a pop cultural zenith seem draining; there’s a funk to contend with, the emotional comedown after the serotonin blast that must accompany, say, witnessing 100,000 people sing your songs back to you at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, a thing that happened to Karol. She had fulfilled unimaginable dreams, made her parents proud, proved herself as a songwriter and performer, and had even found real love with Salomón Villada Hoyos, better known as the Medellín musician Feid, who opened for her on tour.
So after all that, what was left to accomplish? She was itching for growth—personal growth. “I'm not talking about numbers or fame,” she says. “I'm talking about evolving with every single project. I try to not take this for granted; I’m here just trying to be focused, responsible, and taking this super deep.”
The power of manifestation
Karol G decided to take a session with Robin Sharma, the Indian Canadian writer and consultant best known for the 1997 self-help book The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari, subtitled “a fable about fulfilling your dreams and reaching your destiny.” It was January 2024, when she was still on the Mañana tour, and she was feeling the weight of success, wondering what her next step would be, how she could possibly do something that topped what she was currently doing, and how to cope with this new strata of fame. She confided in Sharma that she wanted to make the greatest album of her career; he advised her towards creative visualization, so she started making lists in one of the many notebooks she keeps for writing down ideas, strategies, schedules, and journaling. “I wrote, ‘This is going to be the greatest Latina album in history’… my God,’” she chirps, with a charmingly self-aware laugh. “Okay, but at least you aim high and you get something out of it ... You have to manifest it!”
Karol had toyed around with different ideas before landing on the concept that would become Tropicoqueta; she even considered making an entire album in English, but it didn’t feel like her—most of the music she listens to is in Spanish—and her heart just wasn’t in it. In her notebook, she wrote down genres she loved listening to growing up that are “super Latino,” like vallenato, an accordion-centric folk music of Colombia.
But true inspiration didn’t strike until one night at a party hosted by, she says, “the soccer people”—Luis Suárez and Lionel Messi, superstars of the pitch. “Everyone was dancing the whole night to cumbia from Uruguay and Argentina, and everyone was super happy because it represented those places. So I was like, Maybe I’ll do a song for every single genre that represents our Latina community.” With that idea, she felt a sense of transformation, an opportunity for growth, and a way to reflect back the love that her fans have bestowed upon her. For someone who’d spent years in the netherworld of tour life, the idea was grounding.
Tropicoqueta’s 20 songs make Karol G’s interest in crossing genres explicit: Where she previously focused on reggaetón and flexed her ability to belt out with a banda here and there, on this album she is forgoing much reggaetón in favor of exploring the vast and wildly diverse universe of Latin American music. It feels like there’s a song for nearly every region, but with an inventive twist: the chorus to an Argentinian cumbia track has an interpolation of Wham’s “Careless Whisper,” consistent with the style-mashing of pop-cumbia DJs; a wild, truly innovative Dominican dembow has squeaks and phone chirps for counter-rhythms; and “Ivonny Bonita” has Karol spurring Pharrell, in their first collaboration, to make a bachata with a horn solo and a quiet storm outro. (“Ivonny” is one of Karol’s self-empowerment alter egos, à la Beyoncé's' Sasha Fierce.) Being in love has helped, too—she has captured some of that old-school romantic emotion, and when she talks about Feid she’s both breathless and pragmatic.
“I have a really healthy relationship—I don't want to get back to a place where everyone is talking about my personal life … but I’m in a really great spot in life. It’s crazy at the same time, because sometimes we can’t see each other, but then when we get together it’s really deep and really special.”
More importantly, Tropicoqueta is a reflection of Karol’s emotional maturity, the fact that a bichota’s emotions aren’t fixed. “This album is unapologetic. I talked about love, about heartbreaks, about happiness on my last album, in a place where I was trying to put, like, a cover on myself, trying to separate these topics from the pain,” she says. “But now, after everything, I own my feelings, even if they're not good. I’m just letting myself feel and going deep in every way. So every song, it's really deep, every bar, every word, every meaning. I want to be open about everything. I feel that being a bichota is also understanding that it’s a process, to let yourself go through those moments and making it to the next step.”
Karol G as producer
Her growth also comes from being underestimated as a songwriter, despite consistently proving her artistry, because she often collaborates with men—the innovative Colombian producers Ovy on the Drums and Sky Rompiendo, the Mexican American super-songwriter Edgar Barrera—who are presumed to be doing the real work. “After you left, I had another listening session, and I explained my creative process,” Karol tells me over Zoom a few weeks after we first meet, referring to our studio meet-up. “There was this person that kept saying, No, I noticed it sounds like Edgar producing. This one sounds like Edgar too, this one too, this one too. They’re my ideas, what I wanted to do. I completely lived this album. It’s been in my mind for the last year and a half, every day, every minute,” she continues. “My participation as a producer is super important to me, because every sound is something that I was like, I want this melody with a violin, or I want this melody with a guitar, with a drum, with a piano. I'm involved in almost all of the tracks. So sometimes, when I speak about having Ovy or Sky or Edgar, people think that they create the beat, and they just pass it to me and I do whatever—no. Every single instrument that is on this album has come from what I've listened to all my life, and it's meant to be there for a reason.”
There’s an empathy there, alongside Karol’s refusal to be put down. It’s a quality she picked up on during her stadium tour, too, when she noticed how the Latin American diaspora across the U.S. and Europe seemed hungry to be recognized, to take in a sense of dignity and home at her concerts. “It felt like Karol G is not just Colombian, but from all over. Everyone always brings their flags from their countries, and I was like, Oh my god, I’m doing these kinds of places with this amount of people, and 90% of them are Latinos,” she says. “I wanted to take them as my family, and I don’t want to stop bringing them a piece of home to those places.”
In her creative-visualization notebook, she wrote down genres and producers she wanted to work with, but also feelings she wanted to capture. “I really want people to listen to the album and get these authentic, nostalgic memories,” she says. Even “Papacito,” her first song in English—she is bilingual—was created with Latinos in mind. “It has a special place in my heart because people around the world who don’t speak Spanish will be able to understand what I’m saying,” she says, “but at the same time, I know there are a lot of Latinos born in the U.S. whose first language is English, so they’ll feel connected to it too—they way they’re used to listening to their familias who learned how to speak English with the accent and everything. That song is special, so let’s see.”
Refusing to crossover
Even with Karol’s chart domination, there’s still some pressure to cater to Anglo audiences; her collaborator and clearest predecessor, Shakira, didn’t fully break into the U.S. pop market until she dropped her first album in English, 2001’s Laundry Service. Selena, one of Karol’s idols, was killed before she could witness the mass-culture crossover she would achieve. But Karol and other artists like Bad Bunny, Peso Pluma, and J Balvin are proving that, in the 2020s, audiences are increasingly interested in good music no matter the language—and as of 2024, the economic power of U.S. Latines was $3.6 trillion, per the Latino Donor Collaborative think tank, making the U.S. Latine economy alone the fifth highest in the world.
“Talking with the team like the other day, I was like, ‘I don't see that Latinos are a trend right now. I just see that between what we are doing with the music and with art, like the world is knowing more about our Latina community, our music, our roots, and they're falling in love with it,” says Karol. “I think it's an evolution. Even with my cousins—they were born here, but they're from our family from Colombia. When we were kids, they were like, I'm from the United States. And I was like, You were born here, but you have your roots from Colombia. They didn't identify because they didn’t know the culture, but now they know. I feel like people from all over the Latino community travel and they get to know their roots, so I don't think it's a trend. I think it's a learning experience: We're learning where we are from. And I love that, and I love that I can be in a position where I can bring more of that to the world. For the new generation, I want to introduce them to all those genres that we used to listen to.”
On “Ese Hombre Es Malo,” one of Tropicoqueta’s slower-tempo songs, Karol belts out a ranchera alongside a 57-piece Guadalajaran orchestra. She wrote the song on her computer first, and says that seeing it come alive with instruments was something akin to magic. “When we were recording everything—like the violins, then the guitar, then the trumpets—I could see how every single element brought this to another level. And when you thought it was already perfect, no—then comes the bass, then comes the piano and everything else. At the end, I was like, This song has a lot of power.”
She says she was inspired by the Mexican pop icon Juan Gabriel, and it sounds timeless, like she’s doing a musical interlude in a 1940s film starring silver-screen icon María Felíx. Sitting in the studio, she sways along until its strings evaporate into the orange glow. I get choked up from the cinematic clarity of her voice, and then somehow I find myself telling Karol G, global superstar, about the mariachi records I grew up listening to with my abuelita.
This is the power of Karol G’s music and the promise of Tropicoqueta. “I spent whole nights awake thinking about how to improve every song, every detail, because, of course, I love it,” Karol says. “But there is another part of the album that gives me life—when people listen to it and get the vibe. When I was on tour, I got these comments about me filling the places only with Latinos,” she says, referring to the idea that if she doesn’t “cross over” to the Anglo world her renown is not as legitimate. “But 80,000 people is 80,000 people. If I can say that my Latinos are giving me the opportunity to fill a place with 80,000 people every night, I feel more than proud. So why would I try to be away from them, to look for a new world out there? Why not keep being home for them, every place I go? I found my purpose.”
CONTRIBUTORS
Cover Star: Karol G
Photographer: Elizaveta Porodina
Stylist: Brett Alan Nelson
Hair Stylist: Joeri Rouffa
Makeup Artist: Kennedy
Nail Artist: Mei Kawajiri
Set Designer: Nicholas Des Jardines
Associate Stylists: Mia Navarro, LJ Perez
Tailor: Thao Huynh
Set Dressers: Bella Anselmi, Andy Rapavy