Rosalía‘s fourth studio album is a towering epic, a four-movement work that draws inspiration from female saints and poets with “the intention of verticality.” But the most disarming, by pop standards, aspect of LUX isn’t the Spanish superstar’s spiritual and musical ambitions, or the way she folds them into a compelling structure, but its heart-rending sentimentality, apparent in both the dramatic ways she wields these stories and every small waver of her voice. That’s the quality of its operatic scope that cuts through on each listen, taking stock of her lived experience as much as it seeks to undress it and ascend to a new world. Recorded in 13 languages with the assistance of the London Symphony Orchestra, it’s a sensational record that undoubtedly reaches for the universal. But it’s also a singular document of an artist at the top of her game, shamelessly looking to the past while confronting the oblivion of the future. Gaze still upward, this is her soul overflowing like it’s all unfolding right before her eyes.
1. Sexo, Violencia, y Llantas
LUX’s opener positions the album in the space between earthly love and divine connection. Rather than flitting between the two, the singer carves a linear progression: “First I’ll love the world then I’ll love God.” Beautiful as her lone voice is, the first spine-chilling moment comes when it is supernaturally, if briefly, amplified, as if going through a portal.
2. Reliquia
Lest LUX’s overture appear too high-minded, Rosalía presents a startlingly personal map of memory that becomes an immediate highlight. You may not have found yourself in all the places she mentions – she is a pop star, after all – but it’s likely a few bits and pieces resonate. Over the understated flamenco beat that sounds like an acknowledgement of her past, I was reminded of listening to Los Ángeles upon its release when I was in the UK, where she says she lost her smile. When those glitchy electronics come in – in case you were wondering what Daft Punk’s Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo is doing in the credits – I remembered MOTOMAMI breaking out while I was in Jerez, where she lost her hands. She’s allowed her heart to be touched by them all, but never felt ownership over it, a question lingering over her lament: How much can the world be worth, then?
3. Divinize
“This ghost’s still alive/ I’m still alive,” Rosalía sings, the album’s first English lines signalling profound vulnerability. And hanging by a thread, the song’s arrangement, swirling and muffled, seems to add. When she gets to the pre-chorus, singing “Each vertebra reveals a mystery/ Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary,” she channels LUX guest star Björk, both vocally and in her organic imagery. Through “divine emptiness” her performance remains totally embodied.
4. Porcelana
LUX may not open with a ‘SAOKO’, but for those who care, there’s still ‘Porcelana’ to scan as the record’s pop-adjacent “banger.” Rosalía uses AutoTune as a means of transformation, paying tribute to the Japanese monk, teacher, and poet Ryōnen Gensō, whose beauty distracted other students to the point where she burned her face. Rosalía focuses less on the story than its complex elements – grief, fragility, mutability, anger – while capturing every linguistic nuance of the word diva.
5. Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti
“That’s gonna be the energy,” Rosalía mutters at the end of the song, rapturing its grandiose orchestral finale. Even when she conducts a more traditionally structured aria – singing in Italian with no AutoTune or off-kilter experimentation – the energy is all that matters to her, and it is deeply human even as her acrobatics make her sound like no other human on Earth. When her voice pierces the gut in its smallness, you have to control yourself in anticipating the eruption. Yet she’s in full command of it and the music around her; when she wonders, “How many hugs have you given that could have been blows?” the orchestra seems to stab right back.
6. Berghain
‘Berghain’ is no less baffling in the context of the album than it was as an early single. It’s less Rosalía’s operatic vocals – you’re used them by now – that strike like thunder, but her guests: Björk’s elegiac intervention and Yves Tumor’s fiery reprise of Mike Tyson’s tirade: “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me.” It feels like an important piece of the puzzle that doesn’t totally fit, which is enough to announce we’ve moved on to the second movement of the album.
7. La Perla
LUX may be an album inspired by the stories of female saints, but for a brief waltz, Rosalía abandons its dramatic pretenses to throw a bit of shade (presumably at her ex-fiancé Rauw Alejandro). It’s playful and gossipy, even if there’s weight to accusations of emotional terrorism and unfaithfulness. Rosalía knows this language well, and she’d rather speak it now than forever hold her peace.
8. Mundo Nuevo
Rosalía quickly swerves from the jauntiness of ‘La Perla’ for what might be another side of heartbreak; surrender. She sings of going back into the womb to “see if in a new world I’d find more truth.” As if her attempt to love the world has failed, her instinct is to recoil rather than ascend. Her voice still exalts, but the silence between the lines is painstaking.
9. De Madrugá
Pharrell’s assistance adds another layer of immediacy to a track that already feels right in Rosalía’s comfort zone, taunting and surging in less than two minutes. And just like that, the second movement is over.
10. Dios Es Un Stalker
Rosalía complicates the concept of divinity through cheeky first-person narration; a devilishly funny take on ‘God Is a Woman’. She frames herself as “the labyrinth you can’t escape,” yet every left turn is invigorating.
11. La Yugular
The album’s epic scope reveals itself on ‘La Yugular’, where she reaches back out and immerses herself in the world: “I fit in the world/ And the world fits in me/ I occupy the world/ And the world occupies me.” Skip around the song and you’ll notice it sounds heavenly in all sorts of configurations: guitar and voice; a breathtaking chorus backed by strings; an elegiac choir. She drives the point – infinity as transcendence, the plurality and oneness of voices – home by sampling a 1976 interview with Patti Smith. Simply being part of the world can mean liberating it, breaking on through.
12. Sauvignon Blanc
‘Sauvignon Blanc’ is one of the most straightforward love songs in Rosalía’s catalog; as she dreams of renouncing luxury in favor of partnership, it feels like the purity she seeks throughout the album has come to bear. It’s a song she cannot stretch very far, perhaps because her fame does not permit her to. Yet she gives it one of the album’s most memorable endings: just as she’s done climbing up and down her vocal register, those familiar handclaps bow the song out, almost like a call to arms.
13. La Rumba del Perdón
Or an old song fading back into view: if ‘La Rumba del Perdón’ also stirs flashbacks to El mal querer, it might be because Rosalía and El Guincho have had it in the bag for over five years. Joined by flamenco stars Estrella Morente and Silvia Pérez Cruz, she opens the fourth movement with a story about forgiveness that you actually have to read into; it’s the one song on LUX where the text carries as much, if not more, weight than the music around it.
14. Memória
It’s notable that Rosalía isn’t singing alone on two of the album’s concluding, and arguably most emotional, songs. If ‘La Rumba del Perdón’ is about the meaning of forgiveness, the rueful ‘Memória’ is about the feeling of remembering. Portuguese fado singer Carminho makes it sound like Rosalía isn’t addressing someone in her life but rather another, perhaps future version of herself.
15. Magnolias
One of the things Rosalía wonders about is if she’ll be grateful; she’s quick to answer her own question in ‘Magnolias’. “Life flashed me its knife, took everything I had, and I thanked her for that,” she sings. Her voice, in its constant flux, pierces and stabs like that, too, but the overall feeling is one of delicate serenity. As in the opener, she frames herself between the ground and the beyond, promising to meet God in the middle. On one hand, LUX demonstrates Rosalía’s cultural omnipresence and appetite, peering through the centuries to elevate examples of female divinity; on the other, it is a strikingly disarming and humanizing portrait of her own celebrity that goes as far as to imagine her funeral. It’s a lot to balance, and Rosalía unflinchingly holds her own.
