Karol G wanted to wait to release her new album so it didn’t feel as though she was “exploiting a personal situation”.
While the Colombian singer and songwriter has had a hugely busy and successful few years, which saw her make history as the first Latina to headline Coachella, she was going through a lot behind the scenes, including a break-up and family drama.
She’s now gearing up to drop her sixth studio album, No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto, and opened up to Rolling Stone magazine about why she delayed its release.
Karol explained to Rolling Stone: “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.
“The reason I decided to put the record outside [now] is simply so that people let themselves feel. 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.”
It was the day after the Grammy awards that Karol decided to be open up to her team about how she was feeling, explaining: ““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.
“The very next day after the Grammys, I went to Hawaii and I lived there for about a month and two weeks.
“I kept myself busy with my notebooks, and I wrote a lot of lyrics, poems, and things. 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.”
No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto is due for release on August 7.