Album Review: Lux by Rosalía

Backed by the London Symphony Orchestra and featuring Björk and Yves Tumor, the Catalan superstar’s latest is a dizzying, unmatchable experience It’s fair to say you won’t hear anything remotely like Lux, Catalan pop superstar Rosalía‘s fourth album, anywhere else this year. It’s a record that doesn’t so much stretch the boundaries of contemporary pop music as redefines them completely. Lux is not so much music as art, as pretentious as that may sound.

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This credo has never been more clear than on LUX, an album-length manifesto on the interconnectivity of the world, the universality of music and heartbreak, and the transformative power of faith. The LP also represents an inversion of Rosalía's prior approach to composition -- where she once stippled the edges of her fizzing, globe-trotting pop with experimental detours and alien textures, LUX finds the songwriter and producer distilling her eyebrow-raising omnivorousness into long, measured strokes of deep colour; the Dadaist of MOTOMAMI has found a taste for the Baroque. The bratty playfulness that once animated Rosalía's music is largely gone (though it resurfaces, luckily, in small spurts of levity), having been replaced by a grandiose, classically-indebted sweep that sounds like little else being made in the sphere of pop music today.

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The cover of Rosalía's fourth studio album, “Lux,” shows the Spanish (Catalan) artist cloaked in a nun's habit. Beneath the white fabric, she cradles herself. Even the word “habit” resonates as both a symbolic garment and a daily practice, hinting at the religious virtues that underpin this triumphant and extraordinary four-part and 18-song opus.

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If you’re familiar with Rosalía‘s work, you'll know she's always been in a state of flux. Musical juxtapositions are her strong suit. 2018 breakthrough 'El Mal Querer' filtered flamenco through multi-tracked electronic pop; 'Motomami', released in 2022, was an avant-garde take on reggaeton, padded by industrial sounds and inflected with cyberpunk and Sinogrime flourishes.

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Rosalía is nothing if not ambitious. The Spanish singer-songwriter's albums have tackled disparate genres, from the new flamenco of her 2017 debut, Los Ángeles, to the eclectic hybrid of pop, reggaetón, and dembow of 2022's Motomami. Thematically and structurally, Rosalía's discography is equally as diverse. Her 2018 album El Mal Querer was inspired by Romance of Flamenca, with each track corresponding to a chapter of the anonymous Occitan novel.

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When Rosalía dropped 'Berghain', the lead single from her fourth album, 'LUX’, it was evident that this new record wasn't going to be a continuation of the minimalist reggaeton of 'Motomami' (2022) or the flamenco pop of 'El Mal Querer' (2018). Sung in English, Spanish and German, and featuring mantric chants from Yves Tumor and Björk, ‘Berghain’ felt less like a new song and more like a reset of the boundaries between pop, classical, and club music. And the rest of 'LUX' duly follows suit.

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