Following the release of her least commercially successful album 'Brave' in 2007, which just missed the top ten of the US Billboard 200, Jennifer Lopez started work on her next album while pregnant with twins Emme and Max. In February 2009 a new song from those recording sessions titled 'Hooked On You' leaked online, followed shortly afterwards by the leak of another track called 'What Is Love', which songwriter Wynter Gordon was particularly annoyed about, but which Lopez passed off as her fans being impatient to hear her new music. In February 2010, Lopez left Sony Music Entertainment and Epic Records by mutual consent, with her departure from the label temporarily halting production on the album, but after signing a new contract with Island Def Jam Music Group, recording resumed, and Lopez entered the studio with Kuk Harrell to record brand new material for the record. In February 2011, Lopez told the BBC that the album was nearly complete, and that she had around twenty songs recorded from 2009–2011 which were being considered for the album, but she was finding it hard to edit the final track listing. The lead single from the album was 'Louboutins', which was produced and written by Christopher "Tricky Stewart" and The-Dream for Brandy Norwood, but following Norwood's departure from Epic Records it was subsequently given to Lopez. It topped the US Hot Dance Club Songs chart but did not garner any airplay, and critics gave the song mixed reviews, calling the lyrical content "boring" and "dated", although some did appreciate that the song was "catchy" and had some club appeal to it, and in the end it was excluded from the final track listing of the album. The record was to be called 'Love?', as she felt that "it's an endlessly fascinating topic that all my albums have been about. It's still very confusing to me and so I explore that on this album, probably more than my other albums", with a release date set for March 2011.
Just a few weeks after the first announcement, Rap-Up announced that the album had been pushed back to 19 April 2011, with no reason given for the new date, and then it was pushed back again to 03 May 2011, when it finally appeared. It received mixed reviews from critics, with Sal Cinquemani of Slant Magazine saying that "Love? isn't the all-out dance album it could—and should—have been.", while Hermione Hoby from The Observer commented that she felt that the lyrics let the album down. 'Love?' debuted at number five on the US Billboard 200 chart, selling 83,000 copies in its first week, and performed decently elsewhere, in particular in Australia, New Zealand and Europe. Over half of the 'Love?' album had already leaked in demo form from 2008-2009 before the release of the final album in 2011, and the only new tracks were the ones Lopez had recorded with producer RedOne, which were all placed on the album after the massive success of the lead single 'On The Floor'. The final track listing for the album contained 12 songs, with a further three added to the deluxe edition, but her original comment of there being 20 tracks from the sessions to choose from turned out to be an under-estimate, as a further fifteen songs have since surfaced - in fact there are enough unreleased songs to make up a sister album to 'Love?', including that lost single 'Louboutins', which also gives the album its title.
Track listing
01 Hooked on You
02 Greatest Part of Me
03 Venus
04 Faint
05 On The Radio
06 Mouth 2 Mouth
07 Story Of My Life
08 What I Call Love
09 Stronger
10 What Is Love? (Part II)
11 One Step At A Time
12 Countdown
13 Whipping My Hair
14 Fresh Out The Oven (feat. Pitbull)
15 Louboutins
