The Meaning Behind Every Song on Karol G’s Most Personal Album, In Her Own Words

It’s Tuesday afternoon, and Karol G just landed in Las Vegas, where she’s getting ready for a massive show at the Allegiant Stadium. She’s on a Zoom call from her hotel room, bubbly, ebullient, and excited as ever. Part of this is because a ton is happening: She’s in the middle of her Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour, which is taking on a wild ride across the globe. If that weren’t enough, she’s releasing No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto, an album that shocked fans when she surprise-announced it this month. She’s practically radiating as she talks about how excited she is to share it with the world.

But huge news aside, that constantly upbeat, vivacious personality is just who Karol is. Yet she’s not afraid to admit that last year, she felt a little like a different person. She’d had a packed couple of years: She’d released Tropicoqueta, she made history as the first Latina to headline Coachella, and she’d played stages from Crazy Horse in Paris to the Vatican. Yet behind the scenes, she was going through a lot, including a highly public break-up, family drama, and tons of criticism around her album. She needed a break.

“In the midst of everything, I canceled a lot of things with the team. I told them during Grammys week, ’I need to stop.’ I had never spoken to them so honestly before, but I told them that I had a lot of chaos in my head, a lot of chaos in my heart, that I needed to pause,” she says. “The very next day after the Grammys, I went to Hawaii and I lived there for about a month and two weeks.”

The Colombian star, who is usually the bright center of every party, wanted to be alone. She was completely by herself and sat in her room, constantly writing. “I kept myself busy with my notebooks, and I wrote a lot of lyrics, poems, and things,” she remembers. “I didn’t feel like this was going to be like an album, but I did start writing a lot of music because, like, as an artist and as a composer, you really experience a lot of catharsis through music.” She built a little insular world, listening to her favorite band Cigarettes After Sex, plus the Marias, Latin Mafia, and Oklou. 

But she still didn’t feel right. “I don’t know myself. It’s like I’m a different person. I’ve become super cold. I didn’t want to talk to my friends, I didn’t want to talk to anyone,” Karol remembers thinking. The only thing that helped were letters from fans her team would bring her. Reading what they’d written her gave the singer motivation to talk about what she was feeling, and soon, she was back in the studio, with an outpouring of feelings.

The result ended up being No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto, Karol’s most vulnerable, emotional album yet. It’s also a wayfaring, experimental mix of pop sounds, bouncing between electronic production, aching balladry, and huge star-studded swings. She teams up with Drake, Bruno Mars, Judeline, Rusowsky, and more, creating an intimate portrait of heartbreak intended for fans to listen to from beginning to end. With her producers, who include longtime collaborators Ovy on the Drums, Sky Rompiendo, Edgar Barrera, and Tainy, she refines the tender-hearted sounds on the album (Oklou, who she kept listening to throughout the process, joins on one song.)

The album, Karol admits, was finished for months, but she wanted to wait for the right time to share it. “This album has been ready for a long time, but to be honest, I didn’t want it to feel like I was exploiting a personal situation. I didn’t want it to feel like this album was part of some marketing campaign. It was very personal to me. It was so personal that I didn’t even feel ready to release it,” she says. However, now that she’s found catharsis —  and constant warmth from her fans on her tour every night, she decided it felt like the right time. 

“The reason I decided to put the record outside is simply so that people let themselves feel,” Karol says. “The point of this album is for people to understand that to truly live, we have to feel. If we limit ourselves and let ourselves go, ‘I don’t want to feel, I’m not going to fall in love, I’m not going to give myself the chance, I’m not going to speak up, I’m not going to say anything,’ then we’re not going to live. Living is about feeling — feeling things, feeling every moment, and feeling it to the fullest.” Related Content Karol G Isn’t Holding Anything Back on New Album ‘No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto’ Karol G’s Viajando Por El Mundo Tropitour Is a Bold, Joyous Ode to Latina Power Lil Wayne, Karol G, Smashing Pumpkins to Receive Stars on Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2027 Karol G Celebrates Global Stadium Tour With Unapologetic New Song 'Matadora'

Below, she breaks down all the songs on the album and shares how the music helped her heal and ultimately find herself again.

“Te Llevas To'”This song is a mix of things. I kept telling Tainy, “This has to sound chaotic,” because the emotion I was feeling was anger that comes from chaos. I was in my head like, “I need to get out what I want to say, and I feel like the production has to sound like chaos.” We started with the person in the song looking back, and everything is over: There’s no faith, no future, nothing. Everything has happened. But then it says, “Let me tell you all the good things I’m left with, even though you broke this.” We started with a synthesizer and then we went to these intense drums which are super chaotic. By the end, you just exhale. You’re like, “I let it out.” And that song was the perfect one to start with.

“Maybe”The second track was putting things into context a little more and explaining what was happening. In the first one, I vented my anger. In the second, it’s almost like I’m telling a story through the songs, and that’s when we get to “Maybe.” In “Maybe,” I wanted to start with that phrase, “This time I’m not going to lose you,” which is a phrase that’s repeated a million times in relationships on the brink and it’s never realistic. Like, the relationship gets more and more broken each time, but you’re like, “This time, yes, this time yes, it’ll work.” But in the end, it’s like when you can’t take it anymore, you just can’t. It was super important for me to start the song with that lyric. “Maybe” explains a little bit like, “We couldn’t build anything more here.”

“Bebiendo Lágrimas”“Bebiendo Lagrimas” is when you tell yourself, “I don’t want to go through that again, never again. Love is over.” I said in the trailer I released a few days ago, sometimes you just stop believing in everything. Why? Because pain, specifically, makes you doubt everything, like empathy or kindness in life. I feel like in life, it’s not just one situation. Life changes you little by little, little by little. As humans, we see that people, for some reason, change or give off a different kind of energy, and we sometimes don’t ask ourselves what’s happening to them, what they’re going through, and what we could do for that person to make them feel different. What we do instead is to punish them. So the message of that song is, “I’ve reached my limit in matters of love. I’m burying it, and at least for now, I’m going to enjoy my peace, myself, being alone, enjoying who I am — my career, my friends. But at the moment, I have locked it all away, I’m peaceful, and I prefer it that way. I prefer to be like this.” That’s what I was telling myself. This was one of the first tracks for the album, if not the first.

“Ahí” (feat. Drake)This is like when you’re no longer in a relationship and you can meet people. But you have to give yourself the space to recover, give yourself time. So, it’s the feeling of saying, “Thank you, you’re an amazing person. I’m probably denying myself the chance to experience something amazing, but for now, I can’t. But I’ll keep it there in case it happens in the future.”

I wrote that song on Dec. 31. I didn’t celebrate Christmas partying and all that, but I went to a place in Colombia called Guatapé, and it was more of a retreat. [My producer] Ovy came with me. He went with his family, and I was with mine. Drake singing in Spanish has always been incredible to me; it never seems forced, and I’d had an interaction with him before. He’d written to me once on Instagram to ask me to send a video to his masseuse who was a huge fan so I sent it and then we kept talking about how cool it would be to do something together. But that was a long time ago so when this song happened, I had that conversation in mind. We started talking about making it a duet, like the verses responding to each other. And I was like, “I don’t know, but I’d love it if Drake sang it in Spanish.”