As Paola told Billboard, work on K.O. began as early as 2018, even before she released her previous album Sie7e + (2020). The singer confessed that the first song she wrote for the album was "Friend de Semana" while she was still living in Madrid and shooting Elite.[1] Paola described the album as "personal" and highlighted "Amor Ordinario" as the "most personal" of the album: "[the song] defines my emotional process and everyone that heard it felt my pain and what I went through from beginning to end. I wrote this song in January 2020 and I had to understand what ordinary love meant and that I deserved better".[1]
Title
K.O. is the abbreviated form for "knockout", which is a fight-ending, winning criterion in several full-contactcombat sports, such as boxing, kickboxing, muay thai, mixed martial arts, karate, some forms of taekwondo and other sports involving striking, as well as fighting-based video games. Paola explained the meaning of the title to Billboard: "With this album, I knocked out all of the bad stuff that was killing me, emotionally. I used it to drain everything I had in my heart. That's why I named it K.O. — because it was like the last punch to the heart during this whole process".[2]
Release
On Monday, January 11, 2021, Paola posted a series of photos to Instagram with the caption "Welcome to my break-up party" and announced that she would finally be releasing her sixth studio album, K.O., on Thursday, January 14.[3] However, on Wednesday, January 13, the entire album leaked online and the release was brought forward by a day.
Something really crazy happened; something I, as an artist and as a person, thought "Meh, those kind of things will never happen to me," but it did. I just know that the album leaked. I panicked and screamed, I could not believe what was happening. The [streaming] platforms, obviously in order to protect the content and for it to come out in high quality, released the album earlier; literally a day before.
