There are few hard and fast laws in the world of rock and pop music, but as a general rule of thumb, you can tell an album is considered a big deal if its release involves a global fashion retailer launching an accompanying range of clothes for both adults and children. So it is with J Balvin’s sixth solo album: whatever you make of Guess’s attendant Colores capsule collection (it’s as subtle and understated as you might expect from clothes designed by a singer who expressed his solidarity with 2019’s Pride events by dying his hair rainbow colours) its existence tells you a lot about the enviable commercial position the 34-year-old Colombian currently finds himself in.
If he isn’t so well-known in the UK – where 2017’s platinum-selling Mi Gente remains his only major hit – that’s not a situation reflected elsewhere. Luis Fonsi’s Despacito might have been the song that signalled Latin pop’s ascension to the upper echelons of success outside of Spanish-speaking countries, but it’s Balvin who embodies the genre. He was the first Latino artist to headline Lollapalooza, the first reggaeton artist to appear on Saturday Night Live, and the only guest star at Beyoncé’s epic 2018 Coachella performance who wasn’t a former bandmate or member of her immediate family. That year, he was also the fourth most-streamed artist globally on Spotify.
For further evidence of his hugeness, you only have to look at the cover for Colores, which is hideous – a cutesy cartoon of multicoloured grinning flowers – but the kind of hideous that costs a fortune: it’s the work of Takashi Murakami, the Japanese contemporary artist who once sold a sculpture of an anime teenager masturbating for $15.2m. Or read the list of starry cameo appearances, which won’t take long: there aren’t any. It’s often suggested that Latin pop’s commercial rise is a result of both the global village effect of the internet and the canny use of guest stars to prick the interest of anglophone audiences. Balvin evidently no longer needs the latter, and there’s something understandably confident about Colores, from its grand concept album status (every song is named after a colour, although the lyrics seem conceptual only in so far as they largely revolve around how sexually irresistible Balvin is) to its brevity. Ten songs, over in 29 minutes: no need for a Drake-like attempt to game the streaming systems by sticking out an album with dozens of tracks on it.
For anyone who’s missed the finer points of Balvin’s rise, it provides a concentrated primer. He is widely held to have leapfrogged his urbano music rivals by smoothing out the sound of reggaeton: dialling down the aggression in the vocal delivery to a nonchalant drawl, favouring singing over rapping, being unashamedly tuneful. There are points where Colores delivers something approaching visceral thrills – such as on the gloomy, minimal Negro, when the roughness of the beats chafe against the lush melodicism of Morado – but Balvin’s ability to break cultural boundaries isn’t matched by a desire to smash artistic ones. There’s little of the off-kilter weirdness or the sudden, mid-song stylistic shifts associated with his competitor and sometime collaborator Bad Bunny. Colores is an album of clever production touches – the appealing balafon samples that open Verde; the hazy, shoegazey electronic tones that Diplo weaves around Rosado – rather than head-spinning sonic WTF-ery, the musical equivalent of the blood-soaked visuals in the video for recent single Rojo. The closest it gets to the latter might be sparse opener Amarillo, where the only music in the arrangement is provided by what seem to be people making trumpet noises with their mouths.
It isn’t really interested in standing out by startling the listener, or reeling them in with novelty, but what Colores does have in profusion is a universal brand of pop smarts. There are a plethora of choruses that dig into your brain and breezy but beautifully turned tunes: one listen and Azul is almost impossible to dislodge; even single Blanco, which dispenses with everything except beats, bassline and Balvin’s voice, is infernally catchy. It makes sense that every track comes with a lavish video attached, and not merely because that’s another way of demonstrating his current status. It is focused in a way that a longer album wouldn’t be, and every track sounds like a potential single.
It would be nice if the kind of artistic risk-taking Balvin demonstrates in his videos was reflected more in the music, but under the circumstances, you can’t blame him for sounding pleased with himself. “‘Tamo’ rompiendo o no estamos rompiendo, muchachos?” he asks at the conclusion of Morado (“Are we smashing it or are we not smashing it, guys?) before allowing himself a delighted chuckle and adding the word “global”, which hardly needs translating. Nothing on Colores suggests that the appeal is going to narrow in the foreseeable future.
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