The video to Loco X Volver, the opening track to Maluma’s album by the same name, begins at daybreak, with a Colombian campesino (or farmer) carrying a basket of flowers down the mountain to the strains of an acoustic guitar. The visual — set to the beat of a 6/8 bambuco, the most traditional rhythm of Colombia’s Andean regions — and then Maluma’s opening line —“Mother, what’s this I’m feeling?”—clearly aims to tug at heartstrings.

The song “Loco X Volver” (Dying to Come Back), is a love letter to Colombia that puts everything and the kitchen sink into lyrics and imagery, a smorgasbord of iconic scenes from Maluma’s homeland: soccer, bicycles, firecrackers, grandparents, home cooking, horses, countryside, and a beaming artist who looks genuinely at home (specifically in his state of Antioquia) in the midst of it all. It’s a lot, and yet we lap it up. I watched the video three times in a row, finding new connections to home in every view.

As a Colombian abroad, I am, of course, swayed by this approach. But Loco X Volver, the album, goes much further than simply playing on nostalgia. Maluma’s seventh album is a beautifully rounded, 14-track set where the artist dares to step back from the pop-tinged reggaetón that defines him and adds salsa, vallenato, música popular and acoustic pop.

Featuring collabs with the likes of Belee, Ryan Castro, Kany García and Grupo Frontera, and written and produced together with a cast that includes MadMusick (the production duo of brothers

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