Shakira

Shakira has announced a U.S. arena tour in support of “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran,” her 2024 album that became one of the best-selling records of that year and one of the most quietly defiant pop comebacks in recent memory. The announcement confirms what the numbers have been suggesting for a while now: she is operating at a level most artists half her age would envy.

The Colombian singer, born Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll in Barranquilla in 1977, has had a career arc that would be difficult to script. She released her first record at 13, spent years building an audience in Latin America, and then crossed into global mainstream success in the mid-2000s with “Laundry Service” and the inescapable “Hips Don’t Lie.” At that point she became a kind of permanent pop fixture, someone whose presence was so ubiquitous that her commercial dominance was taken for granted. And then, for a stretch, things got complicated in ways that were very public and fairly grim.

The tax fraud case in Spain dragged on for years. The very public end of her relationship with former soccer player Gerard Pique played out in real time across tabloids on every continent. What could have been career-ending became, at least partially, material. “Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran” was built partly from that wreckage, and it hit with a force that surprised even people who had been tracking her work closely. “Bzrp Music Session #53,” her collaboration with Argentine producer Bizarrap, became one of the most-streamed songs of 2023 before the album even arrived. It contained some of the most pointed lyrical content of her career and sold spectacularly in the process.

The genre navigation has always been her strongest suit. She draws from cumbia, vallenato, and Latin pop in ways that feel organic rather than calculated, and she has been willing to update the sonic palette in real time without losing the thread of what makes her sound hers. The hip-hop and electronic textures on the more recent work are not grafted on. They sit comfortably alongside the acoustic guitar and the more traditional Latin rhythms, because she understands how to make disparate elements coexist.

Live, she remains one of the best arguments for the concert as an event. The Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour, which hit South America and Europe before this U.S. run, has been drawing reviews that emphasize the scale and the physicality of what she puts together on stage. She is not a performer who phones it in. The choreography is intricate, the production is lavish, and she sings live throughout. That last part is still, regrettably, worth noting.

The U.S. arena dates represent a return to a market where she has always been popular but which, for various reasons, has sometimes felt secondary to her international dominance. There’s a case to be made that this tour is the proper claiming of her status as one of the most important artists of the last quarter century. The catalog justifies it. The moment is right.

She has been making music for thirty years. She is better at it now than she has ever been. The arenas will be full.