Coming off what was arguably the biggest Album of 2022, Bad Bunny gave the world a surprise release with nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana, his fifth album. For someone who is usually good at foreseeing things like this, I was actually taken aback when I heard that Benito was releasing something new. With the pressure of doing two tours while trying to release a massive album at the same time last year, I’m surprised he had the energy to follow up with a record that’s an hour and twenty minutes, just as long as the one prior.
I came into this album with few expectations and with as little knowledge as possible, so let’s get into it.
We’ll begin with the opener “NADIE SABE”, the most interesting track on the album for various reasons. Musically, it’s okay, with Benito’s use of orchestra being interesting in theory, though pretty boring in practice. The choir section towards the end of the Song is a highlight and nearly makes up for hearing five minutes of Bad Bunny rapping the same generic flow. What I took away from the song, however, was the contradictory lyricism. Benito starts rather introspective, reflecting on reaching the peak of stardom, which is something I didn’t expect to be honest. Just when I was starting to appreciate his monologue, Benito takes a complete 180 and drenches the listener with his ego while flexing what he’s accomplished.
One of the only other tracks that caught my attention was the lead single “WHERE SHE GOES”, which I have heard a couple months back when it released. While I never was a fan of the song, due to it not being all that interesting (although the production was decent), it certainly was amongst the better songs featuring Bad Bunny that he was released and featured in prior to this album (see my review of “K-POP” here).
“MONACO” follows up from the first track, which also includes an orchestral sample that I found to be much better, but the song as a whole somehow ended up being more boring. Mora was featured in the track “HIBIKI”, coming off the travesty that was his latest album ESTRELLA (see my review here), and while he did pretty decent in the song, it’s too little too late. “FINA” is arguably the worst song off the whole album and definitely has the worst feature with Young Miko.
I could go over each bad song on this album, but that would be a waste of everyone’s time. Fortunately, most of these songs have the same problem. By the time I heard “MR OCTOBER”, I started to question some of the production choices; I was expecting to hear “LEGALIZE NUCLEAR BOMBS” or some other DJ Smokey tagline during the runtime of that track. It becomes more apparent in the next song “CYBERTRUCK” where I theorized that Bad Bunny is simply going to YouTube and searching up “metro boomin type beats” and just using them in these songs.
This confused me a bit because the production team of Tainy and La Pacienca worked really well in Benito’s debut X100PRE. The only reason why I was somewhat interested in hearing a new Bad Bunny album was due to rumors of it being completely trap – a remaking and better version of the debut, as I imagined – following the same vein as the song “Dos Mil 16” from UVST. However, most of this record sounds very lackluster and made without any real effort. This is not even mentioning how low-energy Benito sounds on the album compared to his previous records. Even in Ultimo Tour, which was meant to be very laid-back, Benito had some very explosive and intense moments. In NSLQVAPM, none of that is present.
Towards the end of the record, we do get some tastes of reggaeton, none of which are good. “PERRO NEGRO” featuring Feid was just as you expected and “ACHO PR” has this terrible beat that sounds like it was ripped off from Usher’s “Yeah!”. “UN PREVIEW” is a single for some reason, being your generic reggaeton tune with a performance from Benito that calls back from his early years. Many are already claiming that this is foreshadowing what Bad Bunny’s next album is going to sound like, which would be rather unfortunate, but I’ll save any further thoughts for my closing statement.
Here are my ratings for each song on a scale of 0-4:
- NADIE SABE – 2
- MONACO – 2
- FINA – 0
- HIBIKI – 1
- MR. OCTOBER – 1
- CYBERTRUCK – 1
- VOU 787 – 0
- SEDA – 0
- GRACIAS POR NADA – 0
- TELEFONO NUEVO – 0
- BABY NUEVA – 0
- MERCEDES CAROTA – 1
- LOS PITS – 0
- VUELVE CANDY B – 0
- BATICANO – 1
- NO ME QUIERO CASAR – 1
- WHERE SHE GOES – 2
- THUNDER Y LIGHTNING – 1
- PERRO NEGRO – 1
- EUROPA – N/A
- ACHO PR – 0
- UN PREVIEW – 1
SCORE/Poor: In a year full of disappointments, it’s almost hard to decide which album takes the cake for being the one that has let me down the most. NSLQVAPM, despite my low expectations, is definitely going to be in the conversation as the year closes out.
Since 2020, I made three predictions regarding Bad Bunny’s future, with the last two of them being after the release of UVST:
- Bad Bunny will further diversify his music and get more creative – proven correct with the release of UVST.
- Bad Bunny will then make a trap-only album – proven correct with this latest release.
- Bad Bunny has already hit his peak and will decline in relevancy over the next few years – to be determined, but I’m pretty confident that I’m right, especially considering “UN PREVIEW”, which sounds like we’re going to get another version of the mid album that was YHLQMDLG.
[We rank albums on a scale of Poor, Mediocre, Good, Excellent, and Outstanding]
The post Bad Bunny – nadie sabe lo que va a pasar mañana (Album Review) appeared first on Music Review World.
