Every summer, music slides back into life like a long-forgotten friend. The year's warmer months have a tendency to give the brightest memories their own musical accompaniments, and with global trendsetters all pushing for "song of the summer," landing a warm-weather masterpiece requires not just an understanding of hit-making, but the magic of the season itself. This is the music that defines years -- and in the six preceding this album's release,
Bad Bunny has built his empire.
It's only fitting, then, that the Puerto Rican superstar should define the summer in his own terms. His fourth studio album,
Un Verano Sin Ti, is a page-to-stage adaptation of the season, a representation of the ephemeral feeling that makes the year's middle months so revered. Across incendiary anthems and lone-man ballads he flits between a traditional ensemble -- from earnest party-starter ("Me Fui de Vacaciones") to smooth amante ("Agosto") -- channeling his own memories to grant each an emotional depth. Nights on the San Juan seafront and trips to La Parguera make for snapshots of PR highlife, while a spectrum of loves won and lost varies from the exhilarating optimism of "Ensename a Bailar" to the suffocating lonerism of "Un Coco." Everything here moves with a fundamental easiness, the transience of the season itself written in fleeting romances and night-time drifts along the coast.
At the core of the project is the reggaeton that has defined the musician's 2020s output:
Tony Dize makes for a bold new sparring partner on the impassioned "La Corriente,"
JhayCo and
Rauw Alejandro help lift the party off on "Tarot" and "Party," and solo tracks "Efecto" and "Ojitos Lindos" pay tribute to small-room sensuality. A strong opening run of hits includes the clockwork-like "Me Porto Bonito," a twisting set of rhythms accompanied by
Plan B hit-maker
Chencho Corleone, and "Moscow Mule," a spiritual successor to 2020's "Dakiti" dressed in untarnished joy and sexed-up adrenaline. Yet with the project's expansive 23-track set list,
Bad Bunny can flesh out a wider range of ritmos: a taste of Afrobeats on the
Lakizo-sampling "Ensename a Bailar," some flecks of bossa on the paranoid "Yo No Soy Celoso," and an impassioned leap into Dominican merengue on "Despues de la Playa." The genre-flipping collages of
El Ultimo Tour make a triumphant return, but this time they're given space to bloom: dembow-trap hybrid "Titi Me Pregunto" arcs from hedonistic machismo to downcast introspection, "El Apagon" weaves a sparse PR tribute into a frenzied floor-filler, and rare four-plus-minute runtimes are afforded to the dreamboat-pop of "Otro Atardecer" and the poignant "Andrea." "Dos Mil 16," a scale-model of the rapper's Latin trap roots, revives his oldest producer tag for a portal into a simpler time.
Un Verano is not only a seasonal statement piece but a testament to Bad Bunny's singular songwriting -- across genres, generations, and even languages, he produces landmarks that trace universal joys, sorrows, and passions. As the final amber tones of "Callaita" fade beyond the horizon and the wash of the waves begins to cease, it's hard not to be reminded of just how far this cantante has come. ~ David Crone
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