Bad Bunny's 'Un Verano Sin Ti' Turned a Summer Album Into a Political Act

Bad Bunny released 'Un Verano Sin Ti' on May 6, 2022, without a promotional campaign, without a lead single, without the usual machinery of a major rollout. One day it did not exist; the next it had 23 tracks and a cover image of a sad, one-eyed heart sitting on a beach at sunset. Within a week it had debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200. Within a year it had become the first Spanish-language album ever nominated for a Grammy Album of the Year. The album's title translates as 'A Summer Without You,' and it sounds exactly like that: warm, unhurried, a little melancholy beneath the pleasure. But running through it, from the bomba-inflected production to the political fury of its sixteenth track, is something more deliberate than a vacation playlist. 'Un Verano Sin Ti' is a record about what Puerto Rico is, who it belongs to, and who is trying to take it.

The album is Bad Bunny's fourth solo studio album, released through Rimas Entertainment, and it is his most expansive by every measure. Twenty-three tracks, split into Side A and Side B, span reggaeton, cumbia, mambo, Dominican dembow, bachata, bossa nova, indie pop, and psychedelia. The opening track, 'Moscow Mule,' sets the temperature immediately: unhurried, sun-drenched, built for a speaker on a balcony rather than a club. From there the album moves through moods the way a long summer day does, shifting without announcing the shift. 'Después de la Playa' leans into mambo; 'Yo No Soy Celoso' finds a bossa nova groove; 'Neverita' goes electro-pop. The genre-hopping is real, but it never feels restless, because the album's ambient texture — waves, seagulls, the sound of air moving — holds everything together.

The production is the work of a large ensemble, anchored by two figures. MAG, born Marco Borrero in Brooklyn and of Puerto Rican-Dominican heritage, produced 15 of the 23 tracks, including the two songs that would become the album's highest-charting entries on the Year-End Hot 100: 'Tití Me Preguntó' and 'Me Porto Bonito,' which together accumulated nearly two billion streams in the months after release. Tainy, Bad Bunny's longtime collaborator, co-produced nine tracks. The full producer list runs to more than twenty names, including Albert Hype, who brought credits on nine tracks including 'Ojitos Lindos' and 'Neverita.' The result is an album that sounds unified despite its breadth, because the producers were working toward the same atmospheric goal: the feeling of a Caribbean summer rendered in sound.

The guest list is as carefully chosen as the production roster. Chencho Corleone appears on 'Me Porto Bonito,' which became one of the album's most-played tracks. Jhay Cortez joins on 'Tarot.' Tony Dize, whose career had quieted in the years before the album, contributes to 'La Corriente,' a collaboration that reads as a deliberate act of respect toward an earlier generation of reggaeton. Rauw Alejandro appears on 'Party.' But the collaborations that define the album's character are the ones on Side B, where Bad Bunny reaches toward artists outside the reggaeton mainstream. Bomba Estéreo, the Colombian electronic duo, appear on 'Ojitos Lindos,' a track whose calm, drifting production sounds like it was recorded near water. Buscabulla, the Puerto Rican duo of Raquel Berrios and Luis Alfredo Del Valle, contribute to 'Andrea,' a song that producer MAG built with their sound as a reference point from the start. The Marías, the dream-pop band fronted by María Zardoya, make 'Otro Atardecer' one of the album's most ethereal moments. These are not cameos. They are collaborations that change the texture of the record.

The album was recorded in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, and that geography is not incidental. Bad Bunny has said the record reflects all of his summers growing up on the island, and the Dominican sounds — mambo, dembow, bachata — run through it so thoroughly that critics noted a tension: the album draws deeply from Dominican musical tradition, yet no Dominican artists appear in the features. Rolling Stone's Julyssa Lopez raised the point directly in her review, calling it one of the album's complications. It is worth sitting with. An album this attentive to Caribbean identity, this deliberate about its sonic sources, carries a responsibility to the communities those sounds come from.

All of that context makes track 16 feel like the album's true center of gravity. 'El Apagón' — 'The Blackout' — is a bomba-influenced track that begins as a celebration of Puerto Rico and accumulates into something harder. The title refers to the chronic power outages that have plagued the island, worsened after Hurricane Maria devastated the electrical grid in 2017 and continuing through subsequent failures at the island's power plants. The song calls out the private energy company LUMA Energy and names former Governor Pedro Pierluisi. It celebrates Puerto Rican identity while directing fury at the mainland investors who have descended on the island under Act 22 of 2012, a tax-incentive law that critics argue has driven up housing costs and displaced local residents. Bad Bunny and MAG built the track from scratch, and Bad Bunny specifically wrote the outro for his then-partner Gabriela Berlingeri to sing. Her lines — 'No me quiero ir de aquí / Que se vayan ellos' ('I don't want to leave here / Let them be the ones to go') — are among the most direct political statements on the record.

The song came with a 22-minute music video released on September 17, 2022, the day before Hurricane Fiona made landfall in Puerto Rico and knocked out the island's power again. The video incorporated documentary reporting by independent journalist Bianca Graulau, examining LUMA Energy, Act 22, and the privatization of beaches and land. The timing was not planned. The resonance was unavoidable.

'Un Verano Sin Ti' spent 13 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the most of any album since Drake's 'Views' in 2016. It topped the Billboard 200 Year-End Chart, the first Spanish-language album to do so. At the 23rd Annual Latin Grammy Awards it won Best Urban Music Album. At the 65th Grammy Awards it became the first Spanish-language album nominated for Album of the Year. The IFPI named it the world's best-performing album of 2022, making Bad Bunny the first Latino artist to win that designation.

Those numbers describe reach. What they do not fully describe is what the album was reaching for. Bad Bunny has always used his platform to speak about Puerto Rico — he joined Residente and iLe on 'Afilando los Cuchillos' in 2019 to demand Governor Ricardo Rosselló's resignation, and the protest worked. 'Un Verano Sin Ti' operates differently. The politics are embedded in the pleasure, in the choice of sounds, in the decision to make a summer album that sounds like home and then, at track 16, to say plainly what is happening to that home. The beach on the cover is not just an aesthetic. It is the beach that is being privatized. The summer without you is also a summer without the island as it was.