Empalagando comes from the verb empalagar, which describes the feeling of being overwhelmed by something that is excessively sweet, like a rich dessert. It's a fantastic word that doesn't have a perfect one-word translation in English.
In "Qué Más Pues?", María Becerra uses it metaphorically to shut down J Balvin. When she sings, "me estás empalagando y eso que no es golosina" (you're cloying me, and you're not even candy), she's cleverly saying his attention is so excessive and unwelcome that it's sickening.
This song is a whole conversation between two exes who run into each other, and it is spicy. It kicks off with J Balvin asking the classic question you ask someone you haven't seen in a while: "¿Qué más pues? ¿Cómo te ha ido?" [What's up then? How have you been?]. He immediately gets way too personal, asking if she's single or married. He blames fame for being distracted and losing track of her, but insists he wants another night to clear things up.
María Becerra is having none of it. She reminds him he's the one who lost track of her and that she's with someone new now. She has some amazing comeback lines, calling him out for being full of himself: "Tú sigues siendo el mismo engreído" [You're still the same conceited guy]. She tells him he's not boyfriend material and that he had his chance but was too distracted. When he says he called her, she hits him with the ultimate shutdown: "Yo a ti te llamé en agosto, apareciste en enero" [I called you in August, you showed up in January]. It's the perfect back-and-forth between someone trying to get a second chance and someone who has completely moved on.
J Balvin grew up in Medellín playing guitar in a teenage rock band with Nirvana and Metallica on repeat, and spent part of his teens in Oklahoma and New York picking up English. Born José Álvaro Osorio Balvín in 1985, he had been releasing music in Colombia for about a decade before anyone outside it paid attention.
"6 AM" with Farruko changed that in 2014, and "Ay Vamos" and "Ginza" followed: "Ginza" held number one on Billboard's Hot Latin Songs chart for 22 weeks, a record at the time. He kept singing in Spanish anyway, and "Mi Gente" reached number three on the Hot 100 once Beyoncé joined the remix, before "I Like It" with Cardi B and Bad Bunny went to number one in 2018. His albums run La Familia, Energía, Vibras, Colores (every track named after a color, and a Latin Grammy for best urban album), José and Rayo, plus Oasis, a joint record with Bad Bunny. In August 2019 he became the first Latino artist to headline Lollapalooza in Chicago.