LUX - ROSALíA
- Ben Dale
- 2 hours ago
- 5 min read
LUX blends classical, electronic, and pop influences into a bold exploration of spirituality, femininity, and sacrifice. Anchored by flashes of familiar flamenco-pop, the album demands close attention, cementing Rosalía as one of modern pop’s most inventive voices. The Mic's Ben Dale reports.
In his 1992 song Anthem, Leonard Cohen writes, “Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in”. These are the lines that inspired the title for ROSALÍA’s fourth studio album LUX, she tells Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. Reflecting this theme, at an album listening party in New York City, the words “Sometimes being in complete darkness is the best way to find the light” were projected onto a white sheet in front of the audience. At another event at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona, Rosalía lies flat with her back to the audience on a stage draped in white cloth. As the album plays, she turns to face her fans and remains completely still throughout its duration.
The performance embodied the album’s central themes: God, femininity, purity, death, and surrender. A press release described LUX as “a widescreen emotional arc of feminine mystique, transformation, and spirituality” where sound, language, and culture come together as one. Despite its overarching religious imagery and subtext, Rosalía told an NPR journalist that she was more interested in mysticism and conveying her own personal journey rather than strict religiosity. Her fascination with theology nonetheless shapes her connection to God throughout the record — as she puts it, the least she could do was make an album for him.
Born in Barcelona, her breakthrough El Mal Querer put Rosalía on the map as an innovator. Recorded as her graduate thesis in 2018, the record took the traditions of flamenco and merged them to modern R&B and reggaeton rhythms. 2022’s MOTOMAMI was a lesson in pop mastery, twisting the reggaeton influences from the last album around glitchy hip-hop beats and playful melodies. Where MOTOMAMI felt minimalist, upon first listen LUX moves in the complete opposite direction — expansive, and unrestrained in its ambition. Sung in 13 different languages and arranged in 4 movements, each outlining a separate emotional arc, it reads as a synthesis of classical orchestration and her signature electronic beats. With collaborations from artists such as Björk and London Symphony Orchestra, and contributors including MOTOMAMI co-producers Dylan Wiggins and Noah Goldstein, Pharrell, Caroline Shaw, and Angélica Negrón, the record’s credits feel handpicked from a conservatoire. You might expect such an extensive list of collaborators to blur Rosalía’s artistic vision, but on LUX her voice rings clearer than ever.
Rosalía seems reluctant to describe LUX as anything but pop, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t blatant classic inspiration throughout the record. Lead single Berghain marked a turning point in her sonic evolution. It’s a monumental demonstration of her classical training, blending orchestral melodrama with avant-garde pop. While serving as an introduction to the album as a whole, the track also kicks off the second movement. Sung predominantly in German, the chorus chants of a raw of mix fear and fury, with the song anchored by a chilling a refrain from Björk that states “The only way to save us is through divine intervention”. It’s clear that Rosalía sees Björk not just as a role model but a kindred spirit, with the two also collaborating on 2023’s Orca — a song about tuna fishing on the coast of Iceland. It’s the clearest sign yet that, much like Björk, Rosalía isn’t just bending genres but creating a language of her own.
Where Berghain is unapologetically confrontational, the album begins with the more reserved Sexo, Violencia, y Llantas. The track’s piano and strings announce the delicacy of the themes and emotions that will dominate the rest of the record. The opening line — “Who could live between the two? First love the world, and then love God” — is almost a synopsis for the album’s longing to sit between the earthly and the divine. It builds towards a powerful crescendo, with its orchestral intensity bleeding seamlessly into the next track Reliquia, marking the beginning of the album’s spiritual journey. Porcelana is carried by the particularly unsettling snarl of a double bass as she sings in Spanish, Latin, and Japanese of self-divinization through sacrifice and the subjective nature of judgement. The track is directly inspired by the story of Japanese saint Ryōnen Gensō, who destroyed her face in order to be accepted by a monastery — an act that, while extreme, served as a radical assertion of personal destiny. It reframes sacrifice not as suffering, but as a necessary step toward the clarity that Rosalía spends the rest of LUX searching for.
For all its ambition and reinvention, LUX still carries the pulse of the artist who made it. De Madrugá was originally an unreleased deep cut performed on the El Mal Querer tour, yet despite being reimagined for LUX it still contains some of the flamenco-pop fusion Rosalía is known for. Dios Es Un Stalker follows, arguably even more reminiscent of her earlier reggaeton charm, serving as a brief anchor of familiarity for fans who might find the record’s more demanding passages harder to digest. La Rumba Del Perdón deepens this familiarity through her unique and unmistakable storytelling, painting the narrative of a man who disappears after allegedly stealing drugs from his friend — functioning less as a literal drama and more as an allegory for the nature of forgiveness and who, ultimately, is deserving of it.
These flashes of familiarity aren’t necessarily detours, but grounding points. They’re moments that remind the listener of instincts that Rosalía has spent almost a decade perfecting before she pulls them deeper into the album’s more unconventional spaces. In Memória the percussion thins, the strings swell, and her voice slips back into the devotion that defines the album’s more transcendent passages. The album closes with Magnolias, a ballad not dissimilar to MOTOMAMI’s SAKURA, which feels almost like the singer’s swan song. Here, Rosalía reflects on death and the fleeting nature of life, yet her delivery carries a sense of acceptance and gratitude, transforming death into a contemplative bridge between mortality and transcendence. Through its delicate orchestration and meditative lyrics, Magnolias embodies the album’s exploration of femininity, sacrifice, spiritual questioning, and the soft illumination that comes from surrendering to forces larger than oneself, offering a serene and poignant conclusion to LUX’s ambitious journey.
For all its ambition and reinvention, LUX still carries the pulse of the artist who made it.
However, even as LUX dazzles with its ambition and artistry, it asks something substantial of its listener. Its sprawling structure, shifting languages, and complex orchestration can sometimes feel overwhelming, demanding sustained attention and repeated listens in order to fully appreciate it. Some tracks can risk feeling more like exercises in virtuosity than songs designed for immediate emotional impact, possibly alienating casual fans accustomed to the immediacy of albums like MOTOMAMI and El Mal Querer. The album’s dense layering and conceptual ambition occasionally blur the lines between cohesion and excess, leaving certain passages feeling jumbled rather than immersive. Yet, even in these moments, the audacity of Rosalía’s vision and the clarity of her artistic voice prevent the album from ever truly faltering.
For years to come, LUX will sit beside albums like Vulnicura, YS, and MAGDALENE as a landmark of fearless artistic vision exploring heartbreak, femininity, and devotion. It’s a record that refuses to compromise, yet remains deeply human at its core. It’s a testament to Rosalía’s ability to merge the classical and the contemporary, or the sacred and the sensual. The result is a body of work body of work that is as challenging as it is rewarding. LUX is not just an album — it is a ritual, an experience, and a declaration that Rosalía has fully cemented herself as one of the most inventive and uncompromising voices in modern pop music.
Written by Ben Dale
Edited by Ben Dale
All photos and videos courtesy of ROSALÍA
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