Maluma, Shakira – AGUA
Ten years after Maluma guested on Shakira’s records, the merengue “Agua” finally puts his name first.
Read the coverage of Agua from the week it came out, and the count depends on the outlet. Infobae and several release-week reports called it the fifth song Maluma and Shakira have made together; Dork and a run of Spanish-language sites called it the fourth. Both tallies start from the same list. The one entry in dispute says more about the new single than the lyric sheet does, because for ten years this partnership ran on Shakira’s terms, and Agua, which Paris LG and Sony Music Latin released on September 17, 2026, is the first time it runs on his.
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The disputed entry is the 2016 remix of La Bicicleta, a Carlos Vives and Shakira single on which Maluma added a guest verse. Sony Music Latin saw enough in that pairing to propose a proper one, and in early September 2016 Maluma flew to Barcelona with his production team to work with Shakira. Those sessions produced Chantaje, credited to Shakira featuring Maluma and released on October 28, 2016, as the lead single from her album El Dorado. They also produced Trap, another Shakira-featuring-Maluma track, which her label issued as the album’s fourth single in January 2018. Clandestino, written in Barcelona in April 2018 and released that June, finally shared the billing. Count the remix and the total is five. Count only the songs the two built as a pair, and it is four.
The guest takes the lead
Every one of those records was made in Shakira’s city, on Shakira’s album, or under Shakira’s name first. Agua reverses the arrangement point by point. The credit reads Maluma, Shakira. The copyright line belongs to Paris LG, with Sony Music Latin handling distribution. Maluma announced the song on September 9, and the release statement placed it inside the world of Loco X Volver, the seventh studio album he put out on May 15, 2026, his first since Don Juan in 2023. He has described that record as two years of work and a deliberate return to the sounds he grew up with, a shift he traces to the birth of his daughter, Paris, in 2024. The artist who hosted him in Barcelona a decade ago is now the guest on his project.
The sound shifted with the billing. Chantaje was pop-reggaeton, Trap leaned into Latin trap and R&B, and Clandestino ran on a reggae pulse. Agua is merengue, the Dominican dance rhythm, dressed in polished pop production, and it fits the album Maluma has been making all year, one that already reached for cumbia and vallenato. The writing credits reflect a shared room: the two singers alongside Sky Rompiendo, the Medellín-raised producer behind J Balvin’s albums, plus Yon Mad, Yan Mad, Polo Parra, Alexander Castillo and Cromo X. The lyric builds everything on its title, turning water and thirst into a metaphor for desire, and leaves open whether the water is meant to cool the fire between them or feed it.
The rollout was staged as a reveal. Maluma spent early September posting TikTok clips of himself dancing to snippets of the merengue without naming his partner, then confirmed Shakira with a photograph of the two of them, and a joint Instagram post set the date with a caption declaring they had gone global. The timing carried weight on both sides. Maluma released the song days after the birth of his second child with Susana Gómez. For Shakira, it landed the night before she opened a 12-night residency at a purpose-built stadium in Madrid, playing to around 55,000 people on September 18 in her first Spanish concert in eight years. That run is the only European stop on her Las Mujeres Ya No Lloran World Tour, which closes on October 11.
Hannah Lux Davis, whose credits include videos for Ariana Grande and Miley Cyrus, directed the clip that premiered alongside the single on the artists’ YouTube channels. She takes the title literally: a glossy tropical set of reflections, liquid surfaces and light moving across both singers, with choreography carrying the song in place of a plot. There is no story to follow, and none is needed. The video’s subject is the same as the reunion’s, two performers who have had this chemistry on record since 2016.
The numbers from the first run belong mostly to her. Chantaje topped Billboard’s Hot Latin Songs chart for 11 nonconsecutive weeks and reached No.51 on the Hot 100, and Clandestino climbed to No.9 on Hot Latin Songs while topping three Billboard airplay charts. Those were Shakira records with a rising star beside her. That is what the fourth-or-fifth argument is really about. The four-song count treats the pair as equals from the start, while the five-song count remembers that Maluma arrived as an added verse on someone else’s single. The second version is the truer story, because it measures the distance he has covered, from a guest spot on a Carlos Vives record in 2016 to the top line of the credit in 2026. Agua is the first of the five that he sent out under his own name.