Music
Rosalía’s magnificent new album, LUX, is her most ambitious, experimental – and accessible – yet. By Shaad D’Souza.
The divine discontent of Rosalía’s LUX
Does experimental music have to feel inaccessible? Does it have to speak exclusively to a small group of people or require certain prior knowledge to understand? Obviously not – but too often the word “experimental”, in the world of popular music at least, implies that an album is obscure for the sake of being obscure. Experimental music is seen as the purview of niche record stores and trendily shabby avant-garde cafes populated by those who have a degree in sound design or music theory. There have been deeply experimental mainstream stars, of course – Björk and Kate Bush come to mind, and on a less mainstream level, Laurie Anderson. But centrist pop hasn’t really produced a truly avant-garde star for a long time.
Enter Rosalía. The 33-year-old musician, somewhat improbably, has proved that a mainstream star can still be experimental first, pop second. Born in Catalonia, Rosalía trained in flamenco for nearly a decade at the Catalonia College of Music, a prestigious university that only accepts one student a year in its flamenco program. Her breakthrough 2018 album, El Mal Querer, blended flamenco with elements of pop, R’n’B and urbano, aka contemporary Latin pop. It’s a revelatory, deeply felt album whose formal conceit – it is based on the 13th century Occitan novel Flamenca – doesn’t overwhelm its pop immediacy or breathtaking intricacy.
Its follow-up in 2022, Motomami, announced Rosalía as a true pop star. Intensely minimalist and explosive at the same time, Motomami is brusque and visceral, an avant-garde reggaeton record that somehow became a hit in a number of Spanish-speaking countries and spawned a blockbuster, hugely influential tour. Exploring identity, power and fame, Motomami was a critical darling and suggested Rosalía could work as easily within contemporary sounds, such as reggaeton and trap, as she could flamenco. That Motomami was so deeply contemporary – or at least, so close to pop music – presented a conundrum: would Rosalía dive further into the mainstream or step back from it altogether, having shown she could do it?
LUX, her recently released fourth album, practically laughs in the face of anyone asking that question. It is perhaps Rosalía’s most sophisticated and formally challenging record: a concept album about 13 female saints, sung in 13 different languages and recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra. At the same time, what strikes me about LUX is its trad-pop approach to melody. El Mal Querer was clearly working within flamenco; Motomami, for all its urgency, felt like a million different melodic ideas stitched together, Rosalía often slipping between rap, reggaeton, pop and R’n’B in the space of a single song. That approach is compelling, but it can also be the work of a jack of all trades, masking tepid ability in each discipline.
LUX’s vocal melodies, on the other hand, are fully formed and magnificent. I keep coming back to the album’s second track, “Reliquia”. Although it’s an oddly shaped, disarming song – the violin-backed beauty of its first section quickly gives way to an abrasive, palpitation-inducing rhythm – the hook of “Reliquia” is pure pop, almost Disneyesque in its anthemic grace. Rosalía has never written straightforward pop songs like this, which could soundtrack the climactic scene in a film or be easily covered by another singer. “Reliquia” typifies LUX. This is music that flexes Rosalía’s mainstream ability without at all compromising her flair for conversing with the underground. It is a remarkable achievement. One of the year’s most forward-thinking records could fill arenas and dominate charts, despite the fact there are few, or no, albums quite like it.
LUX was written and recorded in just under three years, which makes its intricacy all the more remarkable. Each of the album’s languages, all sung by Rosalía, correspond to a different saint she researched while making the record. She wrote lyrics in Catalan, translated them to the chosen language and then consulted experts to tidy up and ameliorate her translations.
LUX’s credits list is something to behold. It includes the contemporary classical composer Caroline Shaw, but also Pharrell Williams, the 2000s hip-hop wunderkind turned pop elder statesman; Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo, one half of Daft Punk; Tobias Jesso Jr, the ’70s-inspired singer-songwriter who collaborates with Adele; and French singer, it girl and cultural royalty Charlotte Gainsbourg. Björk and the experimental producer Yves Tumor feature on one song named after Berghain, the legendary Berlin club, while Tumor’s lines are taken, in part, from an infamous Mike Tyson rant. In Rosalía’s world, this not only works but makes sense. Listening to the album, you conclude that nobody except her could have made this record.
These songs, finely engineered and expertly gilded as they are, deal with enticingly weighty, complex ideas. “Dios es un stalker”, a highlight, taps into concepts of divine intervention and the passing of time. Its grandly showtune-y chorus, so bold and bolshie in its sound, belies a song that raises questions and is too smart to answer them. On “La yugular” Rosalía sings about her relationship with God and wonders about her place in the world, suggesting ultimate fealty to her creator, before the whole thing is undercut by spoken word vocals from Patti Smith: “Seven heavens? Big deal – I wanna see the eighth heaven.”
This is both extraordinarily beautiful and deeply troubled music, constantly wrestling with notions of meaning and art-making, life and love, religion and reality. Rosalía, with her clarion, crystalline voice, is an able guide through these thorny themes. There’s something inviting about the way she sings, fragile and resolute at the same time.
LUX often seems contradictory and confusing, and yet Rosalía’s deft ability to code-switch between pop and classical, classical and avant-garde, avant-garde and traditional form, is unlike anyone else of her generation and allows her to explore ideas that might otherwise seem out of place in pop music. LUX makes Motomami and El Mal Querer seem almost rudimentary in comparison. The album’s seams don’t show at all, conceptually or musically, even as it greatly expands the scope of Rosalía’s music. At times, somehow it feels even more accessible than its predecessors – so fully formed and brazen in both aesthetic and style, that any listener simply has to submit.
Of course, submission is hardly the goal of experimental music. At its best, it’s about relinquishing control over meaning and interpretation and allowing someone else to find meaning within it. Rosalía seems to nod to that view on “Reliquia”. It was written about the moment on the Motomami tour when she would cut off a lock of her hair and give it to a fan, and suggests that part of being a pop star is having a certain selflessness, knowing that you have to give yourself away to the world in order to succeed. “Pero mi corazón nunca ha sido mío, yo siempre lo doy,” she sings. “My heart has never been mine, I always give it away.” You can hear that idea on LUX. It’s an album you could make only by leaving everything on the table.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on November 15, 2025 as "Divine discontent".
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