Review of 'Lux', the Passion according to Saint Rosalia

BarcelonaLux It's a 10 out of 10. It's presented as a concept album structured in four movements, as if pursuing the structural solidity of a symphony and the development of a liturgical drama. Four movements, one less than All of life, one dayby Silvia Pérez CruzAnother recent album about a life cycle. And above all, it's a moving work that intertwines lyrics and music with as much daring as respect for the different traditions that make up Rosalía's artistic narrative. Lux would not exist without Los Angeles (2017), The ill will (2018) and Motomami (2022), nor without flamenco, European polyphony, pop, trap, experimental music and Latin rhythms, but it is much more than the sum of all these parts, because, above the remarkable compositional and production discoveries and filigree, the symphonic magnificence of some passages, the naturalness with which it relates beats Urban sounds and baroque violins make the album's 18 songs moving on their own. Lux It's not an exercise in style (or styles).

Tuning in to the influences the album evokes, such as Arca, Bach, Björk, Kate Bush, Nick Cave, Handel, Enrique Morente, Puccini, Sufjan Stevens, Scott Walker, Vivaldi, and the productions of José Torregrosa and Ricard Miralles for Los Chichos, can make the listening experience more stimulating and reward the music lover, but the songs of Lux They are what they are thanks to Rosalía, who has taken artistic ambition beyond expectations, more connected with The ill will with the more Caribbean side, yes, although without the success of With height and Despehá He probably wouldn't have made it to the cathedral of Lux, with the London Symphony Orchestra, the Orfeó Català and the Escolanía de Montserrat integrated with criteria and sensitivity within the universe of the star of Sant Esteve Sesrovires.

1. Voice and languages

As with the best pop music (the best music, in fact), the album isn't a 10 solely because of its musical richness and undeniable harmonic and lyrical virtuosity. It's a 10 precisely because all the complexity and all the references serve ideas and feelings that Rosalía conveys with more transparency than ever. Even her voice, which she previously masked with delight, is now projected with greater clarity; for example, in Divinize (sung in Catalan and some English) and in ballads like My Christ (in Italian) and Sauvignon Blanc (in Spanish), and when, "crowned and thorny" and in dialogue with an impressionistic piano, she alternates Spanish and French in the dramatic Jeanne (Because of Joan of Arc?). Needless to say, for the Catalan-speaking listener it is a special pleasure to hear her sing in Catalan in Divinizewith that intimate naturalness.

On closer inspection, the fact that she chose to sing in thirteen different languages (including Arabic, Hebrew, and Japanese), and that they are intelligible, contributes to the clarity of a voice less treated and filtered than on the previous two albums; it also helps that she follows a strict minor-art meter and uses a less pop vocabulary, with less slang (except for Robot girlfriend) and with more classic metaphorical games. For example, in Magnolias maintains images motomami like KTM motorcycles burning rubber on the coffin, but when emotion is at stake, it opens the notebook of metaphors endorsed by cosmic history:I who come from the stars, today I turn to dust to return to them"

2. A spirituality without intermediaries

Lux It is the Passion according to Saint Rosalia. More specifically, Rosalia's Passion as explained by herself. It begins with the restlessness of one who longs to live between earth and heaven ("first to love the world and then to love God," she says) of Sex, violence and tires and the recapitulation of experiences ("he grew up and learned his audacity in Barcelona"), joys and losses of Relic...involving orchestral and electronic sections in a dialectic not exactly of opposites, but rather of conflicting relationships. And it ends with farewell, death, and the transcendent migration of Memory and MagnoliasA resurrection more poetic than anything else, perhaps more cosmic, because of the stardust. Along the way, through the different stations of the Passion, she unfolds a spirituality without intermediaries, one that aligns with saints who are not necessarily martyrs, although in Jeanne She sings that there is no better love than annihilation. This song also includes a plea for the dissolution of genders, when she says that she will be neither a man nor a woman, because only the heart can call her. A love without papers, then.

Between the romantic piano that opens Sex, violence and tires and the culminating chorus MagnoliasIt refers to dramas, violence, and disillusionment, and also epiphanies, death, and transcendence. But it doesn't advocate sacrifice as a virtuous path, which would be the classic narrative of the male hero and which, in a way, permeated some songs of Motomami and The ill willNow she seeks another way of being in the world, as a woman and as an artist, outside of emotional hells, narcissistic catharsis, and manipulation.

As a woman, because the story is universal enough for many people to recognize themselves in tales of romantic disappointments where God is the metaphor that describes everything that relationships with men have not been. She will never be anyone's half, nor anyone's property, she says in Focu 'ranniAnd it's enough to notice the reproaches he hurls at the ex-lover on his ribs. The pearl, performed with the Mexican-American group Yahritza y su Esencia and phrased like the great songs of Juan Gabriel and Paquita la del Barrio: "Olympic gold medal in the most badass [...] the more you talk They'll build you a monument to dishonesty Loyalty and fidelity are a language you won't understand." As with some songs by Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo, you don't want to be the target of Rosalía's heartbreak. However, she later assures us that she doesn't want revenge (in the Ukrainian fragment of Early morning).

As a woman, we were saying, and also as an artist, because there are lyrics that can be read as reflections on these years in the center of mainstreamLike Tosca singing the aria Vissi d'arteBut without the tragic sense of Puccini's suicidal heroine, Rosalía lives for and from art with an almost teleological dedication; a mission, in Rosalía's own words, that complicates the possibility of living between "the earth" (worldly life) and "heaven" (artistic life). Hence, the transcendence and the yearning for survival of MemoryThe magnificent song she shares with the Portuguese singer Carminho also speaks of the artist's anguish at the prospect of being forgotten. Similarly, in The rumba of forgiveness There's the artist who recalls that her best friend, the one who played guitar, wouldn't be such a friend if he did what he did, and laments that power outweighs love. In this song, which unfolds amidst orchestral arrangements of 70s rumba and brutal percussion, Rosalía invites Sílvia Pérez Cruz and Estrella Morente. It's the same approach she takes with Björk in Berghain: to take off one's hat and acknowledge them as references that bind her to the thread of the same story.

But the piece in which woman and artist merge most strongly (or so it can be interpreted) is the Morente-esque New World"I would like to renounce this world entirely, mother of my heart. To return to live in it again, to see if in a new world I might find more truth," she says, quoting the petenera sung by La Niña de los Peines. Is this a lament, almost furious, for having participated in the bonfire of vanities? In any case, there is the purpose of a new world, as Morente's flamenco was new and Björk's pop was new. As Rosalía is new in November 2025.

3. The sins are not Rosalía's

Rosalía only dresses up for God, never for you or anyone else, she sings in Robot girlfriend like a resounding and definitive cry of liberation. Lux It is a feminist proposal that draws on the thought of Simone Weil, on the gravity and grace that she explicitly cites in My Christ Diamond painting Because love is too serious to trivialize, and too exciting to be lived only according to the rules of a Church. "More alive than ever," she proclaims in Catalan. DivinizeAnd in God is a stalker It warns that she's not just the whore of the moment, but someone from whose labyrinth you cannot escape.

God is omnipresent on the album. Divine love seems to be an ultimate goal, and Berghain, the album cover and some statements to Radio Chica and the Popcast of The New York Times They can make one think of a God indispensable for getting ahead, as if Rosalía were attributing to herself the role of a divine emissary who denies full life to those who do not commune with God. Berghain, in the context of LuxIt's not exactly that anymore. As another of Rosalía's influences, Patti Smith, said, Jesus died for someone's sins, but not for hers. Therefore, despite the symbolic material and the struggle between spiritual ecstasy and carnal sensuality of Berghain (probably inspired by the mystical experiences of the Breton Armelle Nicolas), rather than a proselytizing devotion, in Lux There is a God who functions as a metaphor for emotional peace, just as the devil served as an agent of unease in some metal bands.

As did the great German mystic. Hildegard of BingenAnd like her, other nuns who were also artists and scientists before the Catholic Counter-Reformation condemned them to subordination (if not the most alienating servitude), Rosalía expresses spirituality by doing things: instead of an intimate retreat or elaborating an unequivocally evangelizing discourse like the current Daddy Yankee, makes an album like Lux and projects it as an autonomous work of art that imagines the possibility of a full life and death in a hostile and disappointing world. This is the inspiration that Rosalía draws from the feminine mysticism represented by Hildegard of Bingen (about whom Raquel García-Tomás, the composer of the opera Alexina B.(is preparing a work). As well as adopting Simone Weil's ethics of love.

In the album's songs, however, she doesn't so clearly show other mystical influences, such as revelation through bodily pleasure, except, perhaps, when she pursues grace to Divinize ("my spine is a rosary") or when she describes love as an avalanche in which she wants to sink into The jugularThe most cosmic song on the album, with Arabic harmonies and a poetic coda reminiscent of Maria Arnal.

4. The reformulation of pop

Lux It's the peak of Rosalía, and also of a year that began with Bad Bunny's magnificent album. In Luxwhere only two or three songs (or fragments of songs) are danceable according to club conventions, it reformulates pop without having to justify that it enjoys stirring different stylistic wells as it did in MotomamiThat overwhelming album in which he insisted on the concept of transformation as the essence of his artistic personality. He doesn't need it anymore. Lux It is a maximalist synthesis of Rosalía's musical, sonic, and poetic interests, exuberant even in the most intimate moments.

Originality is a personality that doesn't create from scratch, but rather proudly displays the cards of different traditions and combines them in songs that also seem to reproduce the album's four-movement model (some with more successful dramatic results than others). Moreover, she does so with a broader palette of colors than other artists who have walked the pop path with electronic shoes and the shoulders of an orchestra and a heart. Examples abound. The way she integrates romantic piano, cello, and electronics in Sex, violence, and tires. The solemnity of the symphonic flamenco-copla that takes off New Worldwith Morente and Dorantes in our memories. The intelligence with which he arranges the white voices of the Montserrat Choir in the final chorus of Magnolias. The rope of Relic, which approaches the experimental pulse of Hildur Guðnadóttir to convey despair and leads Rosalía to take refuge in the piano like Scott Walker or Nick Cave when she admits that she is not a saint but that she is "blessed"The fado that makes its way through the guitar in Memory and makes Carminho's voice shine even brighter. The edgy electronics and the rhythm ginchero of Focu' ranni. The symphonic choral trap of PorcelainThe way to infiltrate Arabic harmonies into the Spanish guitar in The jugular...

Lux, the most relevant 60 musical minutes of 2025.