''Vibras'' (English: ''Vibes''
) is the third
studio album
An album is a collection of audio recordings issued on compact disc (CD), Phonograph record, vinyl, audio tape, or another medium such as Digital distribution#Music, digital distribution. Albums of recorded sound were developed in the early ...
by Colombian reggaeton singer
J Balvin
José Álvaro Osorio Balvín (born 7 May 1985), known professionally as J Balvin, is a Colombian singer and songwriter. He has been referred to as the " Prince of Reggaeton" (from Spanish: "Príncipe del Reggaetón"), and is one of the best-sell ...
released on 25 May 2018 through
Universal Latin. The album was promoted with five singles, including the international hit, "
Mi Gente", which was released as the
lead single
A lead single (also known as a debut single) is the first single to be released from a studio album by an artist or a band, usually before the album itself is released and also occasionally on the same day of the album's release date.
Release s ...
of the album.
Development
In June 2017, Balvin together with French producer and DJ
Willy William
Willy Fauade William (born 14 April 1981) is a French DJ, record producer and singer, famous for his club remixes and vocal collaborations with a number of dance music artists. He is most famous for his French hit " Ego" and his Latin hit " Mi Gen ...
released the single, "
Mi Gente". The song became a major commercial success reaching
number one in over thirty countries worldwide, including number three on the US
''Billboard'' Hot 100 chart; it stayed on the chart for 35 consecutive weeks.
According to Balvin he developed the concept for the album from the moment "Mi Gente" started "connecting with audiences around the world", wanting to make a fusion of different world beats and rhythms and refine the
reggaeton
Reggaeton (, ), also known as reggaetón and reguetón (), is a music style that originated in Panama during the late 1980s. It was later popularized in Puerto Rico.
It has evolved from dancehall and has been influenced by American Hip hop m ...
music.
In an interview with Ebro Darden for Beats 1 Radio on
Apple Music
Apple Music is a music, audio and video streaming service developed by Apple Inc. Users select music to stream to their device on-demand, or they can listen to existing playlists. The service also includes the Internet radio stations Apple M ...
in April 2018, Balvin described the sound of the record as 33%
dancehall
Dancehall is a genre of Jamaican popular music that originated in the late 1970s. Initially, dancehall was a more sparse version of reggae than the roots style, which had dominated much of the 1970s.Barrow, Steve & Dalton, Peter (2004) "The Rou ...
, 33%
R&B, and 33% reggaeton. Balvin further elaborated that a lot of love was put into the album's work and that contains different vibes, hence the name, ''Vibras'', "The real meaning of this album was what's going on with Spanish music that's going so global, the fact that we did an album that the beats are so amazing that you don't have to understand what we say, you just have to love the songs."
Talking to
NBC News
NBC News is the news division of the American broadcast television network NBC. The division operates under NBCUniversal Television and Streaming, a division of NBCUniversal, which is, in turn, a subsidiary of Comcast. The news division's var ...
Balvin explained how the core of the album is still the reggaeton, but according to him you can present the genre "in a way that people that don't know reggaeton or don't understand it, they would feel great." The singer further elaborated that he went back to his roots, but also "added some extra spice to it".
Apart of William, the album features multiple other collaborators including the reggaeton duos
Wisin & Yandel
Wisin & Yandel is a Puerto Rican reggaeton duo consisting of Wisin and Yandel. They started their career in the late 1990s and have been together since, winning several awards including a Grammy Award in 2009. They became the first and the only ...
and
Zion & Lennox
Zion & Lennox are a reggaeton music duo from Carolina, Puerto Rico. In 2004, Zion & Lennox released their first studio album titled ''Motivando A La Yal'' under White Lion Records. After their first album, Zion & Lennox decided to start their own ...
, Brazilian singer
Anitta Anitta may refer to:
* Anitta (king), Hittite king
*Anitta (singer)
Larissa de Macedo Machado (born March 30, 1993), known professionally as Anitta, is a Brazilian singer, songwriter and television host. She is regarded as one of biggest Brazi ...
, Mexican indie-pop musician
Carla Morrison
Carla Patricia Morrison Flores (born 19 July 1986), known professionally as Carla Morrison, is a Mexican indie-pop guitarist and singer. She has released three studio albums and has received various awards and nominations including two Grammy Aw ...
, flamenco singer
Rosalía
Rosalia Vila Tobella (born 25 September 1992), known mononymously as Rosalía (, ), is a Spanish singer. Born and raised in the outskirts of Barcelona, she has been described as an "atypical pop star" due to her genre-bending musical styles. ...
and Aruban singer Jeon.
Critical reception
''Vibras'' received generally favorable reviews from music critics. At
Metacritic
Metacritic is a website that review aggregator, aggregates reviews of films, TV shows, music albums, video games and formerly, books. For each product, the scores from each review are averaged (a weighted arithmetic mean, weighted average). M ...
, which assigns a
normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an
average
In ordinary language, an average is a single number taken as representative of a list of numbers, usually the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list (the arithmetic mean). For example, the average of the numbers 2, 3, 4, 7, ...
score of 80 based on 4 reviews.
Thom Jurek of
AllMusic
AllMusic (previously known as All Music Guide and AMG) is an American online music database. It catalogs more than three million album entries and 30 million tracks, as well as information on musicians and bands. Initiated in 1991, the databas ...
described ''Vibras'' as Balvin's attempt to reach English-speaking audience without singing in English. He wrote that the singer's ambition on the record is "grand" and further called it more "consistent" and "varied" than his previous album, ''
Energia'' (2016), "its songwriting, performances, and production are truly inspired, making for an utterly compelling listen and one of the essential soundtracks of summer."
Juana Giaimo of ''
The Guardian
''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...
'' gave the album four out of five stars commending its production, lyrics and Balvin's vocals. She also praised the sound of the reggaeton music on the album calling it "smooth" and "sensual", "tracks such as this still make ''Vibras'' perfect as a party playlist, but confirm that the noisy style of early reggaeton hits such as
Daddy Yankee
Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez (born February 3, 1976), known professionally as Daddy Yankee, is a Puerto Rican rapper, singer, composer, and actor. Known as the " King of Reggaetón" by music critics and fans alike, he is the artist who coined ...
's '
Gasolina
"Gasolina" ( en, "Gasoline") is a song on Daddy Yankee's 2004 album '' Barrio Fino''. It features uncredited vocals from Glory, who sings the line "dame más gasolina" (meaning "Give me more gasoline"). The song was released as the album's lead ...
' is slowly being left behind."
''
Rolling Stone
''Rolling Stone'' is an American monthly magazine that focuses on music, politics, and popular culture. It was founded in San Francisco, San Francisco, California, in 1967 by Jann Wenner, and the music critic Ralph J. Gleason. It was first kno ...
''s Will Hermes stated that ''Vibras'' "happens to be a pan-Latin masterstroke of its own, a set of primo Spanish-language
pop with vibe deep enough to make it universal."
Raisa Bruner of ''
Time
Time is the continued sequence of existence and events that occurs in an apparently irreversible succession from the past, through the present, into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequence events, to ...
'' magazine named ''Vibras'' the fifth best album of 2018, writing "
Balvinhas carved out a space in mainstream music on his own terms; he makes no concessions for English speakers, instead serving up a colorful tour of Latin America's hottest musical trends." ''
Billboard
A billboard (also called a hoarding in the UK and many other parts of the world) is a large outdoor advertising structure (a billing board), typically found in high-traffic areas such as alongside busy roads. Billboards present large advertise ...
'' ranked it at number nine on their year-end list.
Commercial performance
''Vibras'' achieved the highest first-week streams for a Latin album on
Apple Music
Apple Music is a music, audio and video streaming service developed by Apple Inc. Users select music to stream to their device on-demand, or they can listen to existing playlists. The service also includes the Internet radio stations Apple M ...
globally, replacing
Romeo Santos
Anthony "Romeo" Santos (born July 21, 1981) is an American singer, songwriter, record producer and actor who is best known as the frontman and lead vocalist of the bachata group Aventura. In 2002, the song " Obsesión" reached number one in It ...
' 2017 album ''
Golden
Golden means made of, or relating to gold.
Golden may also refer to:
Places United Kingdom
*Golden, in the parish of Probus, Cornwall
* Golden Cap, Dorset
*Golden Square, Soho, London
*Golden Valley, a valley on the River Frome in Gloucestershi ...
''. It also claimed the record for the most-streamed Latin album in 24 hours on the streaming platform for 2018. In the United States, it debuted at number one on the
Top Latin Albums
Top Latin Albums is a record chart published by ''Billboard'' magazine and is labeled as the most important music chart for Spanish language, full-length albums in the American music market. Like all ''Billboard'' album charts, the chart is based ...
chart for the issue dated 9 June 2018. According to
Nielsen Music
Luminate (formerly Nielsen SoundScan, Nielsen Music Products, and MRC Data) is a provider of music sales data. Established by Mike Fine and Mike Shalett in 1991, data is collected weekly and made available every Sunday (for albums sales) and eve ...
, the record sold 22,000
album-equivalent units
The album-equivalent unit, or album equivalent, is a measurement unit in music industry to define the consumption of music that equals the purchase of one album copy. This consumption includes streaming and song downloads in addition to traditi ...
and became Balvin's second number-one album on the chart, following ''Energia'' in 2016. Out of the starting sum, 10,000 were in traditional album sales, which marked the second largest sales week of 2018, behind only
CNCO
CNCO is a Latin American boy band based in Miami, Florida. The group consists of Richard Camacho, Erick Brian Colón, Christopher Vélez and Zabdiel De Jesús; former member Joel Pimentel departed the band in May 2021. They won a five-year reco ...
's
self-titled album that sold 13,000 copies. Additionally, ''Vibras'' scored the largest streaming week ever for a Latin album by an artist; its songs were streamed 16.1 million times. Subsequently, it debuted at number 15 on the US
''Billboard'' 200 and became his highest-charting album on the chart.
Promotion
To further promote the album, Balvin began The Vibras Tour in
Mexico City
Mexico City ( es, link=no, Ciudad de México, ; abbr.: CDMX; Nahuatl: ''Altepetl Mexico'') is the capital and largest city of Mexico, and the most populous city in North America. One of the world's alpha cities, it is located in the Valley o ...
,
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
on 26 May 2018.
Track listing
Personnel
Credits adapted from AllMusic and
Tidal
Tidal is the adjectival form of tide.
Tidal may also refer to:
* ''Tidal'' (album), a 1996 album by Fiona Apple
* Tidal (king), a king involved in the Battle of the Vale of Siddim
* TidalCycles, a live coding environment for music
* Tidal (servic ...
.
Performance
*J Balvin – vocals
*Anitta – vocals
*Jeon – vocals
*Lennox – vocals
*Wisin – vocals
*Yandel – vocals
*Zion – vocals
*Rosalía – vocals
*Carla Morrison – vocals
*Willy William – vocals
Technical
*ChildsPlay – production
*DJ Chuckie – production
*Marcos "Tainy" Masis – production
*Luis Miguel Pardo – production
*Alejandro "Sky" Ramírez – production
*Chris Jeday – production
*Willy William – vocals production
*Hunter Jackson – assistance
*Antonio “Dj Fuse” Olivera – Recording
*
Phil Greiss
Philippe Greiss (known professionally as Phil Greiss) is a Canadian record producer, songwriter, vocal producer, multi-instrumentalist & mix engineer. Greiss's recent work includes production for artists Jason Derulo, J Balvin, Nicki Minaj, Alok, ...
– mixing
*Josh Gudwin – mixing
*Dave Kutch – mastering
Miscellaneous
*Orli Arias – photography
*Luis Bañuelos – design
*Oscar Botello – creative direction, design
*Kris Buhidar – design
Charts
Weekly charts
Year-end charts
Certifications
Release history
References
{{Authority control
2018 albums
J Balvin albums
Spanish-language albums
Latin Grammy Award for Best Urban Music Album
Albums produced by Sky Rompiendo
Albums produced by Tainy