A Nazarene on a skate. Going back to 2019 and Malamente’s video feels like the perfect place to understand how symbolism works for Rosalía. Catholic religious imagery reimagined for Gen Z still does the trick. Today, she releases her fourth studio album, the immense Lux — a labour of love and intellect born from her drive to study and learn; this time, theology and sainthood. In a recent interview with Zane Lowe, she confessed how Leonard Cohen’s words in Anthem shaped this sonic cathedral: “Ring the bells that still can ring, forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in,” she says in English with her unmistakable accent. Even after a week of listening, the Lux experience still feels incomplete — an album so layered in references, styles, linguistics and meaning that it demands time. This is drama at its most ambitious.
The album pays homage to “holy women” and figures of “feminine mysticism” from various cultures: Saint Teresa of Ávila, Hildegard von Bingen, Saint Rose of Lima, Miriam, Sun Bu’er and Saint Olga of Kyiv. Its lyrics, sung in up to thirteen languages, correspond to their lives and legacies. Rosalía exceeds the boundaries of pop by being, above all, an inquisitive student. Lux is luminous, deliberate and direct. Her voice sounds supernatural at times, her arrangements masterful and her storytelling precise because she dismantles the very structures that sustain her genre. She’s also a writer with a hip-hop sensibility — bending rhythm, rhyme and accent to create linguistic tension. She’s been deconstructing language since her early albums, twisting phonetics for effect and making Spanish sound foreign. Lux extends that project: an act of linguistic sculpture that pushes the language into new musical shapes.
There’s been too much commentary online — the noise of overanalysis and memes asking how we’ll dance to this after Despechá. But Rosalía is a national treasure in Spain and one of global pop’s most visionary artists. The fuss proves one thing: people care because her music is intelligent. Lux pushes pop forward, much like Imogen Heap, SOPHIE, Björk, Owen Pallett, Aphex Twin, Arca or Earl Sweatshirt once did — artists who questioned what pop could sound like. Yet Rosalía’s case is distinct. In Spain, she divides opinion; she’s either loved or loathed. Her use of religious imagery confronts a nation still uneasy about its Catholic inheritance. Lux sheds light on her as one of the bravest Spanish musicians to question those cultural links, playing with tradition the way only Lole y Manuel, Camarón and a few others dared.
If El mal querer was her graduation project in flamenco and Motomami was her study in experimental pop for a post-pandemic world on screens, Lux feels like a degree in humanism. It’s about being blessed rather than saintly, romantic rather than pious. A poet of her generation, Rosalía uses multilingualism and postmodernism as tools of faith.
Lux starts as if a travelling shot were approaching a room where someone is playing beautiful chords on the piano. Sexo, violencia y llantas opens with “quién pudiera vivir entre los dos, primero amaré al mundo y luego a Dios”, a statement that sets the journey ahead. But just a minute in, she goes from zero to a hundred, showcasing the full range of her voice. In Reliquia, she mentions things she’s lost all over the world, the most striking being “Perdí mi fe en DC / En Japón lloré y mis pestañas deshilé”, which feels both observational and personal. “Pero mi corazón nunca ha sido mío, siempre lo doy,” she sings, breaking our hearts with one of the most beautiful choruses in recent memory. “No soy una Santa, pero estoy blessed” becomes almost the album’s slogan, with a crystal-sharpened piano cutting through the sadness in the air.
Divinize is a self-reassuring song — “through my body you can see the light, (...) bruise me I’ll eat my pride” — where she makes Catalan rhyme with English with wit and grace, galloping over timbals and violins like racing horses (“This ghost’s still alive, I’m still alive / Està més viva que mai, més viva que mai”). Brioschi would be proud. Porcelana feels especially close to her, sung partly in Catalan with an orchestra that builds suspense, the bass carried by the trombone. Inspired by the story of a Japanese saint, it’s about women divinised by themselves, featuring mysterious Japanese rapping, palmas and a brilliant choir battling the brushes, tension rising gently — a nod to Motomami’s superb genre fusion. Singing “Traje algo pa’ que tú te relajes / Aquí tienes este homenaje / Soy la diva del tigueraje / Traje algo que te puede dar coraje”, she delivers a flow that evokes both rap-like references and sauciness.
Mio Cristo is grandiose and familiar, an aria perfected over a year on the piano, paying homage to both Maria Callas and Mina. Operatic, emotional and breathtaking, it moves from “really?” to “wow, she really went and did that.” This song asks for a whisky on the rocks, a broken heart and an almost empty bar in a noir film. The flute in the background and her majestic phrasing of “Mio Cristo piange diamante (My Christ cries diamonds)” make you feel every syllable. “Mio caro amico, con te la gravità è graziosa” feels like a euphemism for love and its history — as dramatic as the violins themselves — inspired by her grandmother’s devotion to classical music and her “Pavarotti records”, according to NPR.
La perla is a modern varieté, witty and playful, dropping terms like “red flags” and “icon” in a structure touching on copla and zarzuela. Featuring Mexican group Yahritza y su Esencia, its brilliance lies in the linguistic tension of “una perla de mucho cuidao (a pain in the neck)”. Rosalía takes a revisionist role again in Mundo nuevo, an interlude that feels like a copla reimagined as a saeta in an opera house, flamenco bursting out of her chest. It’s the kind of song that first drew attention from flamenco purists. But she, careless, sings almost screaming from the desert that she’d love to inhabit a new world in which to find more truth.
De madrugá has her singing in Spanish with flamenco rhythms and Ukrainian words at an upbeat pace, like the soundtrack of an action film where you’re running in a flamenco dress and trainers, singing “No hay un arma, una Glock o Beretta / Que dispare y te traiga de vuelta,” a line reclaiming her identity as a songwriter. Dios es un stalker toys with tango and holds some of the album’s best lyrics: “No soy la zorra del momento, soy un laberinto del que no puedes salir.” Rosalía told France Inter the song “contains a sense of humour because I did it from the point of view of God, which is absurd.” Piano, trumpets and timbals keep it perfectly dynamic.
La yugular — “¿cuántas historias caben en veintiún gramos?” — is a waltz-like ballad linking Andalusian expression with an Arab chorus and closing with a voice memo from Patti Smith. On paper, it could sound chaotic, but in Lux it fits perfectly — a poetic anadiplosis leading to “Pero él cabe en mi pecho, y mi pecho ocupa su amor, y en su amor me quiero perder.” The confusion between God and a loved one floats over the entire album, peaking when she sings “Donde atan los caballos / Los míos bien amarrados,” the galloping onomatopoeia marking a highlight of Lux. Sauvignon Blanc was re-recorded after a conversation with French band Justice taught her to pronounce the title properly. It’s one of the album’s most transcendent and spiritual tracks. According to The New York Times, Saint Teresa of Jesus directly influenced her, as she too gave up material wealth to pursue spiritual life. At the same time, Rosalía keeps a nod to her American influences — the occasional brand name may feel jarring, but it succeeds metaphorically.
La rumba del perdón is the party of forgiveness, literally. What could be read as a religious act becomes instead an act of liberation, turning forgiveness into a path to emotional lightness. Fiery flamenco vocals and palmas, subtle guitars, dramatic violins, the Choir of Montserrat and the presence of Estrella Morente and Silvia Pérez Cruz (two of Spain’s greatest voices) ignite the track. It all peaks with her brilliant verse: “Tres cosas necesitarás / Fuego en las manos / Ternura en los ojos / Y a mí presente en el lugar / Técnicamente eso sería un trío / Pero si solo miro / No contará.” Goosebumps. Memória, sung in Portuguese with the wonderful Carminho, takes a fado shape that closes this opera in a reflective tone. A confessional moment hides in this autofictional story, preparing us for the finale.
Magnolias becomes a universal fantasy of death as a subjective concept, almost a swan song — a brilliant existential closure. It’s Rosalía’s final argument, her ultimate question, delivered beautifully as she evokes her funeral and makes us think of our own. In a picture, KTMs race as magnolias bloom over her fictional casket while she, otherworldly, sings with visceral tenderness: “Hoy se derrocha / Burlando la suerte / Y lo que no hice en vida / Lo hacéis en mi Muerte.”
Just as the bonus tracks are gorgeous but don’t add much to this already intense album (Focu ‘ranni being the exception), it makes sense that Berghain was chosen to present it. The title doesn’t refer to the Berlin club, but actually means “mountain shelter”. The song mirrors its video, where Rosalía lives a domestic life surrounded by an orchestra that barely fits in her living room. Berghain is among the best songs she has ever made, a compressed essence of Lux. Featuring Björk’s unmistakable voice and Yves Tumor’s punk-like edge, it encapsulates Rosalía’s art: rooted in Spanish tradition, open to global sounds, blending alt textures with avant-garde songwriting. Lux is almost impossible to compare with anything. It’s unique, and that’s where its divinity lies.
Rosalía has confessed how unprepared she once felt for such a project, often crying during sessions with the London Symphony Orchestra. Yet her mastery is staggering. In a pop landscape ruled by electronics, the instrumentation here feels tactile and human, spatial and sacred. Most saints in Lux share something essential: sacrifice. And that also leads to the mirror effect that Rosalía creates in her audience. To put everything in context, the same way she deals daily with unfair critics of her work, it is frustrating that such a powerful artist does not use her enormous platform to reiterate statements that simply care about what’s happening right now in the world — especially when it comes to an album about divinity and humanism. Her words on Palestine have been lukewarm, to say the least; her real estate investments do not really fit into the narrative of this “spiritual” era; and fans expect her to express her political opinions. This is not trivial, as we cannot really separate the artist from her work when it comes to content of this kind, and in a way it makes the Lux experience a little less enjoyable. It’s one of the best albums in recent years, but it certainly raises the question of how we relate to pop stars today — even more so when they are millionaires in a world that is currently suffering.
Lux is brutalist and ambitious, but never sterile. As she recently wrote on her Substack: “Si la presión hace diamantes ¿por qué no estamos brillando? (If the pressure makes diamonds, why aren’t we all shining?)”. The heart is the main instrument here. Emotion, not perfection, guides the album. And as many noted her nun’s cap on the cover, few saw the straitjacket beneath it — a contradiction that defines the work. In Lux, faith and art merge into one incandescent truth: light only exists because of the cracks. So, Lux is optimal in all its quality and realness; we might just need to see the artist’s presence in the world with more and real light to completely believe her fantastic-sounding prophecy.