Karol G released "Tusa" on November 7, 2019, and within weeks the song had done something unusual: it gave millions of Spanish speakers a precise word for a feeling they already knew but had never been able to name. That word, "tusa," is Colombian slang for the specific, evolved ache of a breakup that won't leave you alone, the kind of sadness that curdles into spite when you realize you still can't get over someone no matter what you do. The song didn't invent the feeling. It just finally said it out loud.
The track was produced by Ovy on the Drums, the Medellín-born producer Daniel Echavarría Oviedo, who had been working with Karol G since her debut album Unstoppable in 2017. Written by Karol G, Nicki Minaj, Ovy on the Drums, and Keityn, "Tusa" runs three minutes and twenty seconds and sits squarely in the reggaeton tradition, built on the dembow rhythm that has defined the genre since the 1990s. What Ovy on the Drums brought to the production was a lightness of touch: the beat breathes, the melody sits close to the voice, and nothing crowds the emotional center of the lyric.
Karol G, born Carolina Giraldo Navarro in Medellín on February 14, 1991, had spent years navigating a genre that rarely made room for women. She had studied music at the University of Antioquia, moved to New York in 2014 to learn the industry, and built her career through collaborations and relentless touring before her breakthrough with "Ahora Me Llama" alongside Bad Bunny in 2017. By 2019 she was established enough to pull off a transatlantic pairing with Nicki Minaj, a collaboration that could have felt like a marketing exercise but instead worked because the two artists were singing about the same thing from opposite sides of the story.
Karol G's verses carry the weight of the woman who can't shake her ex. Nicki Minaj's rap delivers the counter-argument: the man is told, flatly, that she has moved on. The structural tension between those two perspectives is what gives "Tusa" its emotional texture. The song holds both truths at once, the lingering and the leaving, and refuses to resolve them neatly. That ambivalence is precisely what "tusa" means, and the song earns the word it borrows.
The chart response was immediate. "Tusa" debuted at No. 1 on Billboard's Hot Latin Songs chart, becoming the first song with a female lead artist to debut atop that chart since 2016. It held the top spot for four weeks and climbed to No. 55 on the all-genre Billboard Hot 100. In Argentina, it reigned over the Billboard Argentina Hot 100 for 16 weeks, a record for that chart. The song also topped the Latin Airplay chart, making it No. 1 simultaneously across the four main Latin songs charts, a feat only two songs achieved in all of 2019. The Latin Recording Academy nominated it for Record of the Year and Song of the Year at the Latin Grammy Awards.
The reach of "Tusa" across Latin America reflected something real about the song's subject matter. Reggaeton had long been associated with a particular kind of bravado, and Karol G had always pushed against that expectation, writing from a place of emotional honesty that her audience recognized. "Tusa" concentrated that quality into a single, precise word and sent it across the continent. The song accumulated over a billion views on its music video and became one of the defining Latin pop moments of 2019 and 2020.
"Tusa" was released as the lead single from Karol G's third studio album, KG0516, which arrived on March 25, 2021, through Universal Music Latino, with Ovy on the Drums handling production across the record. The album title is Karol G's Colombian phone number prefix, a detail that anchors the whole project in Medellín, in the specific geography of where she came from. The single had been out for more than a year before the album appeared, which meant it had already done its cultural work independently, naming a feeling and letting it circulate before the larger body of work arrived to contextualize it.
Ovy on the Drums went on to produce "Cairo" with Karol G in 2022, the third single from her fourth album Mañana Será Bonito, and appeared as a featured artist on "+57" in November 2024, a Colombian all-star collaboration that also included Feid, J Balvin, Maluma, Ryan Castro, and Blessd. The working relationship between Karol G and Ovy on the Drums is one of the more durable creative partnerships in contemporary Latin music, built on a shared understanding of how reggaeton's rhythmic architecture can carry emotional weight without becoming heavy.
What "Tusa" did, in the end, was demonstrate that precision matters in pop music. A song that names something exactly, in the right language, at the right moment, travels further than a song that gestures at a general feeling. Karol G and Nicki Minaj gave the word a melody, Ovy on the Drums gave it a beat, and the rest followed.
