Rosalía

Redferns for ABA

Spanish songstress Rosalía burst onto the world stage with her Latin Grammy-winning 2018 album El Mal Querer. At the time, the classically trained musician presented a one-of-a-kind take on the 13th-century novel *Flamenca birthed out of her time in the Catalonia College of Music’s prestigious flamenco program. With her smash 2022 album Motomami, *Rosalía took her sound global, incorporating traditionally Latin genres like reggaeton and bachata into her vision.

With her new album Lux, out now, Rosalía again demonstrates the unique, studied musicianship that created *El Mal Querer. *But the new project takes it even further than pop artists today have ever ventured, as the singer croons in more than a dozen different languages and combines elements of classical music and opera with Rosalia’s own spirituality. The end result is a tour de force from start to finish unlike anything ever released on a worldwide scale.

The album’s lead single “Berghain,” a collaboration with the equally avant-garde Björk and Yves Tumor, signaled that Rosalía was leaving the grittier sounds of *Motomami *in her motorcycle’s rear view mirror. The London Symphony Orchestra helps Rosalía bring her grand vision to life, taking the listener on a sonic and global journey from start to finish.

Singing in 13 languages across the album’s nearly hourlong runtime, Rosalía bares her rawest vocals – and emotions – on breathy offerings like “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” “La Yugular,” and “La Perla.” Breath, and life itself, is a key component of the project. “The breath, that’s where it all starts. That’s why in the beginning of the album, after that piano intro [on ‘Sexo, Violencia y Llantas’], the beginning is a breath. That’s the first human sound on the album,” she explained to NPR.

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While many of the songs reminisce on previous relationships, Rosalía sings them from a place of maturity and security in the human she’s become. She sings to lovers past and present with passion, admits her vulnerabilities with angelic vocals and captivating orchestral instrumentation, and ultimately, rises above her past emotional hardships to transform into a new person – and an even better, more evolved artist. “My skin is thin, made of porcelain, and from it emanates / Light that illuminates, or divine ruin,“ she sings on “Porcelana,“ acknowledging “Pleasure numbs my pain / Pain numbs my pleasure.”

With Lux, Rosalia reminds the world that she can’t be placed into a box, despite her viewing herself as a simple pop artist and rejecting the idea of being a so-called avant-garde pop star. “I think in general, I don’t relate to many labels. I don’t relate to many -isms. I don’t relate to any of those terms,“ she said on The New York Times’ Popcast. “I think I just try to be a musician the best way I can and push in experimentation.”

“I want to think that my music is pop. It’s just another way of making pop. There has to exist another way of making it pop,“ she added. “Björk proved it. Kate Bush proved it. There has to exist other ways of making pop music. And I need to think that what I’m doing is pop, because otherwise I don’t think then that I am succeeding. What I want to do is make music that hopefully a lot of people can enjoy. That’s my desire.”