PERO NO TE ENAMORES

After 2023’s *Pa las Baby’s y Belikeada* proved all but indomitable on the charts, the last thing Fuerza Regida leader Jesús Ortiz Paz (aka JOP) wanted to do was make the same album again. “It got me really thinking, really creative,” he tells Apple Music. “We went to a different country, created different music, and this is what we got.” Fueled by the extraordinary success of their Marshmello team-up “HARLEY QUINN” and further inspired by Drake’s ambitiously divergent *Honestly, Nevermind*, the group headed in a new direction creatively and set up a writing camp to make it happen. The end result of their electronic experiments, *PERO NO TE ENAMORES* makes for one of most unique albums not just in the band’s catalog to date, but also in música mexicana history. Boasting collaborations with dance music heavy hitters AFROJACK and Major Lazer, as well as appearances by Colombian superstar Maluma and Mexico City’s own Bellakath, the 15-track effort merges EDM and other club-centric styles with the group’s signature sound. Disparate genres like drill and Jersey club somehow make sense in this hybrid context, evidenced on “FREESTYLE” and “BELLA.” While fans adjust to this new approach, “JESUS” and the title track largely stick to the familiar format that made the group the veritable juggernaut it is today. “It’s risky, something new, but we still have all our essence and all our lingo,” JOP says. “You’re hearing Fuerza Regida still.” Read on to learn about some of his favorite songs from *PERO NO TE ENAMORES*—in his own words. **“TUQLO”** “The vibe is, two years ago we started writing more about females and girls. One of my boys that was looking at the charts, he’s like, ‘Hey, all the songs on the Top 10 are about a girl.’ I was like, ‘What have we been doing all this fucking time?’ So, that’s what we started doing. Now everyone’s writing about a female, right? But in those times, no one was really paying attention in our genre. Reggaetón, they knew what’s up. We sat down and we just mastered it. We know how to talk about it. We got a little bit of rizz, so we just rizzed up the song and that’s it.” **“NEL”** “We were at the camp right there, and we were making so much music. Armenta, one of my main writers, he showed me the song. I was so fried, I was like, ‘Let’s leave it there; I can’t choose right now.’ Then I just recorded that shit, and we loved it. A lot of people fuck with that song.” **“SOFIA”** “I wrote it with Armenta and Jorge \[Jiménez Sanchez\]. Then we left it up to Gordo—the producer Carnage, now Gordo. He came in and killed it, dog. I just gave him my vocal with the guitar. I knew that he knew the songs that I wanted to do. He knows the genre, so he was going to make it sound good.” **“SECRETO VICTORIA”** “It’s kind of like ‘HARLEY QUINN’; we put the actual Jersey club 808s in there. With this song, we didn’t put no tololoche, no actual instrument base. We left it up to the 808s. We added the rest—the requinto, trombone, the charchetas. We’re calling it ‘Jersey corridos,’ That’s the new shit we’re doing.” **“FRESITA”** “That was the last song we made. I had all these writers making music, and then some of my boys, just my homies that were with me on the trip, they went to a room, and they put on an instrumental. I went in there and I heard it and I’m like, ‘Damn!’ I laid some bars, too. One of my managers was like, ‘Bellakath has to be on your album.’ We had the song for her.”