The cloying smell of cigarettes and poppers. The faint thumping of dark electronic music under the din of wannabe-socialites clamoring for entry to the club. Screaming arguments with your lover that leave you praying for God’s intercession. Lead teddy bears with flaming brains, the resignation of sugar cubes dissolving in hot coffee. These are quick flashes of the universe that Catalan popstar Rosalía conjures on the song “Berghain,” which features Björk and Yves Tumor and serves as the lead single for her brand-new album LUX.
To call the track eclectic would be an understatement — it begins its journey with Rosalía’s operatic vocals soaring over strings in the style of Mozart’s Dies Irae, makes a pit stop somewhere in the utopia Björk sang about in 2017 and concludes with a haunting spoken word performance by Yves Tumor as claustrophobic beats close in. Despite the dizzying combination of influences, the song feels fully realized: Each progression is accomplished smoothly and naturally, each lyric is penned with purpose. The song ends exactly when it needs to, but every preceding moment is crucial.
This feeling of completeness hasn’t always existed in Rosalía’s music. Much of her earlier material, while maintaining its own merits, has been marked by her propensity to disrupt and truncate. Take the first song off of 2022’s Motomami, “SAOKO”: the track’s grinding bass and self-assured rap seems to establish a pattern for the first minute and a half before she throws it all out the window for an interlude featuring jazzy piano and spoken word. There’s barely time allowed to process the whiplash before she does it again, returning to the anchoring beat and proceeding as if nothing has happened until the song comes to an abrupt end (fittingly, her final words on the track translate to “get it up it and cut it, that’s it”). It’s a great song, but it feels somewhat half-baked. While the musical ideas she introduces are interesting and unique, they aren’t given adequate space to breathe before she throws something new into the mix.
On LUX, Rosalía breaks free from this pattern, flexing her muscles fully for the first time in her career. In an interview with Zane Lowe for Apple Music, she described her intentions in creating the album.
“I make music for people to feel. And maybe they’re going to feel the most if I really go all the way … ’cuz maybe I’m not allowing myself to go all the way. … Maybe I’m writing songs, but I’m not finishing the thought … so I promised myself that I was going to make an album where I was going to at least try to finish the thought.”
This is apparent throughout the track list of LUX, which spans 15 songs, each of which function as individual case studies of different places, characters and emotions. The album maintains cohesiveness as a whole, but it’s still easy to dip in and out at any given moment and not feel like you’re missing the bigger picture. Each song provides a foray into a particular universe that’s perfectly fleshed out by itself.
A major contribution to Rosalía’s world building on LUX is the daunting linguistic project she chose to undertake, singing in a total of 13 different languages including Spanish, Catalan, Ukrainian, Arabic, Japanese and German. She worked with translators to polish the product, ensuring that her words both make grammatical sense and achieve the intended lyrical effect. The standout track “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” is written entirely in Sicilian and describes an intense platonic relationship inspired by that of Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi. The result is transportive: Her commitment to fully immersing herself in this imagined world creates the breathtaking feeling that the song was pulled off a dusty old record from an Italian thrift store, not from an album crafted by one of today’s biggest international popstars.
The production of LUX is striking, often invoking dramatic orchestral arrangements to create feelings of awe and grandeur. On the opening track “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas,” a lilting piano introduction is soon carried away by the London Symphony Orchestra, which swells and ebbs as Rosalía describes her desire to bridge the gap between earth and heaven. The orchestra crescendos to a peak as she belts out images of this divine amalgamation, only to drop to a sudden pianissimo as she makes a choice between the two: “Primero amaré el mundo / y luego amaré a Dios,” which translates to “I’ll love the world first, and then I’ll love God.” The utterly gorgeous “Mundo Nuevo” similarly enlists a sweeping string section to great effect, underscoring her lamentations over the pervasive untruth in the world.
However, remnants of her musical past still find ways to manifest throughout the track list. “De Madrugá,” a long-time unreleased favorite that was originally intended for 2018’s El Mal Querer, recalls the earworm flamenco-pop that first brought her to the spotlight. Elsewhere, Rosalía dons her Motomami helmet once more with a grinding, distorted bass that overtakes morose strings on “Porcelana.” While LUX honors both her roots and her present focus on classical arrangements, several moments also look to the future: The skittering glitch-pop that finishes out the track “Reliquia” sounds like nothing she’s ever created before, perhaps hinting at a new musical direction ripe for exploration.
Rosalía has always subverted expectations, packing highly commercial albums with experiments rarely seen executed on such a massive scale. On LUX, she perfects her craft. Every switch-up takes us to a better destination; every glitch and oddity serves an evident purpose. While the album’s rich content can’t exactly be described as streamlined, you get the sense that she has honed in on what makes a Rosalía song great — finally cutting out all the fluff. The magic of LUX comes from this intersection: Rosalía asserts her mastery of songwriting while simultaneously embarking on new and exciting musical journeys, cementing herself in the process as one of the most interesting and innovative popstars of our time.
Daily Arts Contributor Max Janevic can be reached at janevicm@umich.edu.
