Shakira is back! It was quiet for a long time about the Colombian superstar. Now, after seven years – and a very special healing journey, she has released a new album. We meet Shakira where her career began 20 years ago with her first music contract: in the Sony Studios in Miami.

“Shak was held up at home, but should be arriving any minute,” says Shakira’s manager, poking her head briefly in the door to the room where I’m waiting for the singer-songwriter. The room is part of the recording studios of Sony Music in Miami – the music company with which Shakira signed her first contract over 30 years ago. The studios are located in a surreal, two-story cube that is enclosed by a three-meter-high concrete wall and completely mirrored with one-sided viewing windows.
After a short while, a security gate opens in the concrete wall outside and a Lamborghini Urus approaches the building. The door opens and there she comes, with a firm step and a huge mane of blonde curls blowing in the wind. Shakira approaches the window and seems to be doing a quick fitness check – not realizing that I’m looking at her on the other side of the mirrored glass just as closely as she is looking at herself. She’s wearing a fitted bustier, platform sneakers and low-cut cargo pants that draw the eye to what are perhaps the most famous hips in the world.

Shakira’s smash hit of the noughties, “Hips Don’t Lie”, is by no means only known to the singer’s fans: The song made music history with over a billion (!) views on Spotify and what feels like just as many memes about the singer’s rhythmic hip movements. This was followed by an unparalleled music career, with three Grammy awards and appearances at the world’s biggest sporting events from the Super Bowl to the FIFA World Cup. And yet the Colombian superstar has been unexpectedly quiet in recent years. Until she shot back to the top of the music business within a few months in 2023.

First she was named the first “Latin Woman of the Year” by Billboard in May 2023, closely followed by her award with the Michael Jackson Video Vanguard Award at the MTV Video Music Awards in September 2023. In January 2024 she released the diss track “Bzrp Music Sessions, Vol. 53” with the Argentinian producer and DJ Bizarrap against soccer player Gerard Piqué, her ex-boyfriend and father of her two children, who is said to have cheated on her. A song that went down in YouTube history as the most viewed new Latin song. And in March 2024, her brand new album was released, Shakira’s first studio album in seven years.

“I found my creativity in my pain.”

The fact that this musical renaissance is also proof of her personal growth journey is evident from the name of her current album. Under the title “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran”, in English “Women don’t cry anymore”, 16 very diverse songs are brought together: slow ballads, classic rock songs and typical dance floor hits. The project is not only the singer’s first studio album in many years, but also a response to a time of personal crisis. “I was deep in the dirt,” says Shakira today, referring to her much-publicized separation from Gerard Piqué. “I had to rebuild myself and put all the pieces that had fallen apart back together.” It’s not an easy task to face such an emotional shambles. But that is exactly what the singer has overcome and now wants to use her new songs to empower other women to find their own strength and transform “pain into creativity”.

In the transformation process after her separation, which was mercilessly exploited by the tabloid press, Shakira also learned a new – and healing – form of boundaries. “I have rebuilt myself in the way I think is right,” she explains. “Nobody tells me how to cry or when to cry, nobody tells me how to raise my children, nobody tells me how to become a better version of myself. That is now my decision.”

“Nobody can tell us how to heal and cleanse our wounds anymore. Nobody can control us.”

Something in her tone tells me that she is not yet finished with her transformation – and with her path to greater empowerment. She sips her espresso and twirls one of her large blonde curls around her finger. “In the past, women were expected to hold back in difficult situations, hide their pain and cry in silence. That is over. No one is allowed to tell us how we should heal and clean our wounds. No one should control us.”

“Us” in this case means all women. That’s why Shakira has a clear opinion when it comes to female collaboration: women in the music industry should support each other. That’s why it was a no-brainer for her to team up with Cardi B for the song “Puntería”. “The song is about a newborn woman,” explains Shakira. “It’s about how we find our way back to our passions and needs after a storm.”

For the music video, Shakira and Cardi B play the daughters of the Greek goddess of hunting Artemis, who hunt centaurs on a planet ruled by women – “centaurs with six-packs,” as Shakira says. “Because on this planet, men are happy when they are dominated by women.”

Sexual empowerment is therefore an integral part of Shakira’s feminism. Interesting, because the 47-year-old singer was socialized in a very Catholic country. In Colombia, parts of the population still see the role of women in a very conservative way, as Michael Edward Stanfield, professor of history and Latin American studies at the University of San Francisco, writes. When I ask Shakira about the image of women in Colombia, she remembers a time when her mother’s skirts gradually got longer – because her father wanted them that way. She also remembers that she always longed for role models for whom female strength and short hemlines were not a contradiction. Like Wonder Woman. “I firmly believe that women should be given the tools to achieve anything they want in this world – and that we should show them that they don’t have to give up their femininity to do so.”

Shakira therefore sees it as a major feminist task to get men to respect women unconditionally – regardless of the length of their skirts. In addition, men must finally understand that power does not give you the right to humiliate others. An upbringing that she also tries to enforce with her two sons.

One week after our conversation, I am allowed to accompany Shakira during a song recording. On a stage in a warehouse studio, I see her rhythmically swinging her hips to the sounds of traditional Mexican Música Norteña, dressed in black studded leather. A moment later, she closes her eyes and signals to an assistant to get a mirror and her makeup bag. The music stops. And I watch this singer, who writes, produces, performs, recovers from heartbreak and public malice while trying to raise sons to be feminists, wiping away her sweat and touching up her lipstick. The perfect symbol for the renaissance of Shakira, who is bursting with energy and self-empowerment both musically and privately.

What’s next for the singer and mother? Hopefully her own hair care line!