Rosalía is back with her new album, Lux. The project is a genre-bending experience with influences from around the world and feminist hagiographies from a collection of religious traditions. With near-universal critical acclaim, it exists as a generational statement about womanhood, identity, and faith.
Pop music is largely amorphous. With the passing of time, what is considered pop shifts and changes in a way few other genres do. It pulls from all other types of music to create the structure of the genre, but still, pop music has boundaries. Rosalía, with her 2022 album, Motomami, existed securely within this changing space. Armed with techno, reggaeton, and her old faithful, flamenco, she crafted a sonic world that was bold, minimalist, and inarguably pop. With her latest album, Lux, she has stretched herself beyond the world of pop, pushing it further than others have dared to before. She has dove deep into the waters of classical music, global influences, and feminine hagiography to create a project that feels utterly unique and genre-defining. The album stands alone, even when compared to her previous work and the works of visionary pieces of the year like Lorde’s Virgin and Jade’s That’s Showbiz Baby.
Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, sung in 13 languages, Lux is a lofty and ambitious album that dares to show an alternative way of understanding what pop music even is. Throughout its tracklist we see a version of Rosalía who has grown beyond her past material, pushing herself creatively and redefining her artistry. There are some whispers of Motomami, and her 2018 album El Mal Querer (translation: The Bad Loving), but they are just that – whispers. Lux stands on its own as a statement about femininity, spirituality, and who Rosalía is as an artist. The project also raises interesting points in how it was made and the intentionality behind the creative choices made by Rosalía to tell the stories she seeks to tell with this album.
Language on Lux as connection
Throughout the album, Rosalía weaves together lyrics in her familiar Spanish and Catalan with Arabic, Japanese, Ukrainian, and a collection of other languages. Of this decision, she has stated that she spent an entire year writing the lyrics for Lux, utilising different languages as ingredients in her creative process to express concepts as close to the truth as possible. Describing each lyric as a fight, she laboured over minutiae of translation and communication to zero in on messaging that felt authentic to the stories being told, rather than ones that may be the most accessible. One of her main points of inspiration in the conception of the lyrical journey Lux takes you on was the lives and stories of female saints from a collection of spiritual traditions. Rosalía uses a variety of languages to communicate through the lens of hagiography. By doing this, she knows that the average listener will have to hunt for deeper meaning, but does so to evoke the idea of higher spiritual knowledge. It replicates the lived experiences of women who believe they are in communion with divinity. Channelling women who, in their faith, found themselves reaching a plane of knowledge that is not common but instead is divine.
Particularly of cited points of inspiration like Hildegarde von Bingen, the connection between these voices from spiritual history and Rosalía is clear. Von Bingen was a polymath of the written word and of musical composition, using various mediums to express faith. Rosalía evokes this same approach with the intricacy and intentionality woven through every word and note on the album. Lux transcends pop and elevates it to a nexus of consumable music and symphonic hermeneutics. She does not dilute and she does not understate; the divine inspiration on this album is explicit. One example of this is the track Porcelana (Translation: Porcelain), inspired in part by Ryōnen Gensō, a Japanese saint. Driven by her devotion to monastic Zen Buddhism, Gensō maimed her own face, expressing humility and dedication to ascetic life. Gensō maimed her face in order to pursue monastic life, prioritising knowledge and spirituality over vanity. The song captures this extremity of faith with Japanese lyrics, and a production that feels foreboding. It also uses the story as a mirror of the position women are often put in, of being valued for their beauty instead of their intellect.
She also uses language in this way to make this feel like a truly global album. With each new language that Rosalía introduces to the spiritual world of Lux, there is a seamless and often not immediately noticeable transition. This feels intentional as she decidedly presents language not as a barrier but a bridge. In an era where political discourse is skewing more and more isolationist, she is deciding to reject that and instead focus on connectivity and cross-cultural communication. For an album that often feels transcendent of the times we are living in, this subtle nod to globalistic and collectivist ideals is understated but impossible to ignore.
Radically human music
Of her choice to sing in various languages, Rosalía has been asked in interviews if she used AI to augment pronunciation for her delivery. She vehemently rejects the idea of using AI in her music, emphasising the aggressive and even radical humanity of Lux. Wanting to create a body of work that feels human inherently, she leans heavily into the classical music scoring of the project. This positions Lux as music that is not only strictly human in its conception, but essentially cannot be replicated by artificial intelligence, or even electronic production methods more broadly. In this way Lux is a true departure from Motomami, embracing the vibrancy and maximalist nature of classical music. The choice to use the orchestra and have this be an album that can only be created with the collaboration of people, rather than machines, is quite an important statement in this day and age.
We have all grown tired of hearing about the hegemonic spread of AI into every corner of our lives, from work to our entertainment. Rosalía speaks to this frustration subtextually through the production of Lux. By using an orchestra to create a pop album, she defiantly marches back into the world of music before AI could spew out imitations of human art, and even before the rise of the computerised production that dominates pop today. Lux becomes evocative of a movement more largely away from the digital and into the analogue, the manual over the automatic. She does not eschew her success of the past, built on electronic production, with some flavours of it woven into certain tracks, but the emphasis remains on the decidedly human production of the music. She doubled down on this approach, recording the entrie album over the span of three days live, refusing to use looping (taking already recorded sections of a song and pasting them into an audio file instead of manually recording secondary choruses). The performance of the London Symphony Orchestra is phenomenal; they capitalise on the ability to sonically emote that only classical music truly has the ability to do. At points, the album sounds elated, at others solemn, and at others still it sounds threatening. All serves to push more strongly the emotive and inner arc that Lux guides you through.
Further to this, her vocal delivery on this album is exceptional and authentic. At points on the album, such as in Divinize, Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti (Translation: My Christ Cries Diamonds), and Memórias (Translation: Memories), she sounds utterly angelic. While Rosalía has always been an accomplished vocalist, this feels like a significant jump forward from her past work. Vocal control and technical execution are abundant on Lux. The voice becomes an instrument in the collective, working with the maximalism of the orchestral score to communicate emotion and spirituality throughout the album.
Mujeridad, hagiografia, spiritualidad and Rosalía
Lux is an inherently feminist and inherently spiritual album. With the prior stated influence from various hagiographies, Rosalía interrogates what feminine spirituality is, existing at the confluence of feminism and religion. The opening lyrics of the album, on the track Sexo, Violencia y Llantas (Translation: Sex, Violence and Tyres), introduce this core thesis. They translate to ‘who could live between the two, first to love the world, then to love God’. Rosalía treats this as the core of what Lux is about, diving deeply into a complex world of religious imagery and readings of this imagery through a feminist lens. As she summons concepts like reliquary, original sin, asceticism, and mortality with the ease of a theologian, she does so with an unflinching reclamation of spirituality on her own terms. The concept of existing between the divine and the mortal is bookended by the final track, Magnolias. The song sees Rosalía contemplating her death, closing with lyrics that discuss being derived from the cosmos, then becoming dust, only to return to the cosmos once more in the afterlife.
Women have been largely excluded from dominant narratives about spirituality, often relegated to secondary characters in masculine stories of faith and religious devotion. By maintaining hagiography as a central motif and point of inspiration on Lux, Rosalía rejects spirituality through a masculinised lens. This extends into even exploring the concept of divinity itself, with tracks like La Yugular (Translation: The Jugular) exploring the very nature of God. On the track she heavily draws on Islamic concepts of the divine, largely inspired by the female Sufi mystic Rabia. She transcends the boundaries of religious traditions to synthesise a sprituality that is more concerned with the intricacies of belief instead of the division of religious labels. The track concludes with Rosalía ruminating on the expansiveness of God as a concept, closing out with a final musing on the limitations of heavenly concepts for mortal minds. Further to this, God features again on the track Dios Es Un Stalker (Translation: God Is A Stalker), which sees Rosalía explore the concept of the divine trailing behind you as you live your life. While she doesn’t make specific observations about God as a character in the explicit, the implicit observations she makes about faith are deeply nuanced.
Through this theming, Rosalía explores more earthly concepts such as romantic love and consumeristic desire. It is an intoxicating and bracing approach to weaving the divine into the intimate. In this way, Lux blurs the lines between the spiritual and the corporeal. With tracks like La Perla (Translation: The Pearl) and La Rumba Del Perdón (Translation: The Rumba of Forgiveness), she casts partners in the same light as spiritual aberrations, not mincing her words. In other areas of the album she draws on hagiography to express feelings of romance, namely the album’s second track, Reliquia (Translation: Relic) draws on the scattered relics of Santa Rosa de Lima. De Lima’s relics are spread across the world, Rosalía uses this as a metaphor for breaking her body into pieces across the world for a lover to find, insisting on an aspect of her following them wherever they go.
She draws from a feminist hagiography that feels revolutionary and woven into the patchwork of traditions with ease. It’s quite the feat to even make religious music (if we can truly call this that) and brand it as pop. Across Lux there are lyrics and metaphors that feel evocative of magical realist fiction. No doubt this is largely in part thanks to the strong tradition of magical realist and surrealist art across multiple mediums within the rich cultural canon of Iberia and Latin America. There are points on Lux that summon comparison to the paintings of Francisco Goya or the writing of Gabriel García Márquez. She really isn’t scared of the boxes that commercialism would have her confined to. It’s like she purposefully takes that expectation and pivots away from it. It’s so introspective yet connective, personal yet global.
So, is this pop music?
In interviews, Rosalía has said that for her, this album is as pop as Motomami, and I can actually see it. Despite the clearly high-brow, avant-garde core of the project, it is still music that has a clear mainstream appeal. Tracks like Reliquia, La Perla, or even Berghain (the lead single) have radio friendly facades that work as a Trojan horse for the depth and intellectualistic truth of this album. In some ways, Lux feels like the endpoint of poptimism. Pop is taken seriously as a critically significant genre of music, and has been for years. Has it all been leading to a point like this? The point at which a mainstream pop star creates a body of work that exists to challenge and redefine what pop is, and what it can be. Rosalía pushes it beyond the baseline expectation of both critics and audiences. It is an album that takes the playbook of artists in the pop world, and also in the Latin music world, and tears it up. Lux is inherently pop but also stands somewhere beyond it. It is cerebral, divisive, and fiercely unique.
Through the album, you hear naturally the classical music throughout, but also her old faithful of flamenco, fado, regional Mexican music and various other flavours. With the underpinning influence of the London Symphony Orchestra, Lux is asking us to see pop music not as merely a genre in itself, but as a foundation for experimentation. Lux takes us on a journey akin to a musical of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but instead of through a staunch Florentine man’s eyes, the eyes of one of music’s most creatively ambitious women. The lead single, Berghain, displays this nature well. The song, our first taste of Lux, is a trip through orchestral instrumentation and near operatic vocal delivery. It divorces Rosalía from the safety of pop music’s trappings, challenging the very fabric of pop as a genre.
As I come away from the project and look at it in the macro, I believe it sits in a space entirely unique to Rosalía. While it is inherently a pop record, it is also inherently classical music and does not shirk Rosalía’s flamenco genesis. In contrast to other pop music that takes genres and weaves them into itself, Lux feels more like an amalgamation of these disparate pieces to create something new, perhaps a prog-pop of sorts? It is something clearly of the pop world, but in its own stratosphere.
A generational masterpiece
Rosalía has always been a critical darling. She comes from a staunchly traditionalist genre with a decade of education in its composition, a genre she readily modernised and repackaged for a wider audience. From this origin, she expanded her reach into the sounds of Latin America, a natural progression for any artist in the Spanish-language music space. Each move of her career has been received with heavy acclaim, and each album has been decisive in the messages they have aimed to tell. With this context, the bar was high for any album that would have followed Motomami. Rosalía could have easily taken this expectation and created something that would have been celebrated, but she instead created an album that feels interested only in speaking to the inner thoughts she has, rather than chasing acclaim. It is just her luck, or rather her talent, that has ensured another critically celebrated body of work. It is this radical authenticity, something that separates generational artists and projects like Charli xcx’s Brat or Billie Eilish’s Happier Than Ever, from music that sticks around for a season before fading into distant memory.
Lux is a bold statement about spirituality, womanhood, and global connectivity. It feels unapologetically Rosalía, unafraid to indulge itself in intellectualism, but does not feel inaccessible in tandem. A rare balance is struck on the album between demolishing boundaries of popular music and retaining its ability to be enjoyable for a wider audience. Between the production, the multilingual lyricism, and the best vocals of Rosalía’s career is a project that feels instantly timeless. Truly, Lux is a generational masterpiece.
