When you listen to LUX, the fourth album by the Spanish singer, icon Rosalía, you desperately want to love and have sex like she does – a mind-expanding experience that brings at least one of the people involved closer to God through pleasure, love, pain and self-awareness.
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And that brings us to the heart of the matter: On LUX, Rosalía deals with the divine and the all-too-human in four movements, inspired by the lives of female Christian saints like Teresa of Ávila or Hildegard of Bingen, their preoccupation with feminism and, presumably, the separation from her fiancé Rauwr Alejandro and her path back to life through heartbreak. And hasn’t Christian – or generally religious – mysticism always been surprisingly close to the physical experience of love, both its emotional and physical sides?
In any case, Rosalía has no inhibitions about bringing these two worlds together, framed in a musical framework that, with “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas,” builds the bridge between the reggaeton-inspired previous album MOTOMAMI and the sound of LUX, which oscillates between classical music, opera, flamenco, rumba and of course pop – and on which Rosalía speaks in a dozen languages (in addition to Spanish, English and Catalan, including German, Japanese, Ukrainian, Italian, Portuguese, Arabic or Chinese) sings.
Is that still pop? Or already classical music?
Since the release of the only pre-single “Berghain” (which was not about the Berghain club, but Rosalía sings about lead teddy bears and love in the style of the early, not yet scandal-stricken Rammstein), audiences and critics have been discussing whether this is still pop at all – or is it already classical music? Maybe this question doesn’t matter at all: LUX is the multi-voiced answer to a multi-vocal present, no matter what the worldwide authoritarian backlash wants to say. Genre and language boundaries? If Rosalía doesn’t want to tell the story of female self-awareness and strength, she can lose herself in a rave and a few songs later use a straight waltz from a Disney production to get even with past lovers and unreliable men.
And above all, LUX is a celebration of handmade music: Rosalía lives out her classical musical training more than perhaps ever before, lets out her inner opera diva, collaborates with the London Symphony Orchestra, with her role model Björk, the Fado legend Carminho and flamenco stars Estrella Morente and Silvia Pérez, and also has younger, not quite as established colleagues like Yves Tumor and Yahritza y su Esencia invited.
And: Some of the songs can only be heard on the physical albums. This is partly clever marketing, of course, but in addition to the music with the orchestra and waltz and rumba moments, it is also a symbol of the trend pendulum that swings back from the maximum artificiality of hyperpop in response to pop avatars and AI music into the world of the real, the physically tangible, the uniquely human and individual.
With LUX, Rosalía brings the bombast back to pop, embraces experimentation and creates an album that truly no one else could have written but her. An alternative to the world of mediocrity that the tech world and AI fanatics want to sell us. Cheers to uniqueness, cheers to Rosalía.
This review appears in Musikexpress 1/2025.