The Singles Jukebox

Our 2023 champion still fares well…

[Video]
[7.25]

Jel Bugle: Angry era Shakira is pretty good! Shakira has always been great. Glad she’s not singing in English, can just enjoy her voice without any baggage of understanding the words. 
[9]

Mark Sinker: The name of a Colombian song and dance-form also known as terapia (therapy), the word champeta “originally denoted a short, curved, monkey-killing knife of the same name used in the region at work, in the kitchen, and as an offensive weapon… ” But if it’s about escaping a tiresome situation, it’s just as much about where you might end up, and the through-line highlight here is really its twinkling soukous guitar.  
[8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Just as much of a concession to median pop norms as the last time we covered her, but far more successful in that context; you could write a whole & logical musical genealogy explicating why it works for Shakira to lean on afrobeats here, but the truth is that she just sounds looser that she has in perhaps a decade here — it’s not as commanding of a performance as her BZRP session from last year, but she sounds overjoyed to float through the track, weaving between guitar figures and occasional dips into Tainy-core synth moodiness with an trickster-like breeziness that has always been one of her strengths as a performer.
[8]

Tim de Reuse: When you’re Shakira, you get to tell your producers to ignore all trends in the field of pop music production in the last five years; keep it tropical, wide-open, sleek, glassy. I suppose if I was in her producers’ position, I wouldn’t want to put anything between her voice and the audience’s ears anyway. Despite the bureaucracy of the arrangement, there’s at least one distinct Shakiraism in each line of the breathy, twisting chorus: more character than most of her peers manage to put in a whole track’s vocal performance.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: Learning Alexander Castillo was an acolyte of Max Martin was a shock because this is such a complete cycling through of Latin pop and Afrobeats by someone who is apparently not African (at least not directly by parentage) and who knows how to layer a snare. God bless him. Shakira sounds excellent too.
[10]

Katherine St. Asaph: “Bzrp Music Sessions #53” was just a fluke, wasn’t it?
[4]

Alfred Soto: Compared to the Shakira of yore “Soltera” shows a slight loss of speed but not verve — she still sounds like a potential hook-up, intensified by a couple well-mixed cocktails, is a moment’s monument. 
[7]

Dave Moore: Some strong, down-the-middle pop reggaeton from Shakira, who sounds like she’s having a good time, which is almost but not quite enough to make this stick. It has, however, conveniently reminded me to dust off her album from March to confirm it’s making my top ten this year (it is).
[6]