Rosalía has done it again with 'Berghain' at the Brit Awards
Many of Rosalía's fans probably thought she wouldn't perform live. BerghainNot only because of the vocal difficulties and the need for orchestral accompaniment, but also because of the structural and stylistic changes this piece, just over three minutes long, entails. But yes, she has done it again. She has captivated us once more. It seems that the woman from San Esteban Sesrovires truly invites us to participate in a double divine possession: first by Apollo, when she sings with the head voice that seduces with a strong German rationality, and then by Dionysus, with the remix by Conrad Taylor (with "till you love me").
The winner of Brit Awards 2026 International Artist of the Year awardThe award, given on Saturday in Manchester by the British recording industry, and which has prevailed over Bad Bunny, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga, Sabrina Carpenter and a long etcetera, has been discussed again.
The live performance of Berghain, a song that until now we had only had the opportunity to enjoy in the music video that premiered with the album LuxThis performance cannot be considered merely a pop act justifying the award it received, but rather a sublime aesthetic manifestation of contemporary fragmentation. In this piece, Rosalía consolidates her transition, following the path of her previous albums, towards an ontology born from the dichotomy between human and machine, where the voice no longer seeks only the expression of classical interiority, but becomes yet another texture in a brutalist sonic machine. Rosalía's lyric soprano vocal performance establishes a dialectic with the telluric nature of Björk's intervention (sensational and unique, as always!), which accompanied her in this magnificent performance. The latter, with its organic intervallic leaps and use of atonality, acts as the residue of a humanity that resists being completely digitized.
The collective dance that ends the piece might remind us of the unbridled, ecstatic frenzy of any night at Berlin's famous Berghain club. The creative direction by Pilar Vila Tobella and the set design and choreography by (La)Horde—a French collective of choreographers and filmmakers such as Marine Brutti, Jonathan Debrouwer, and Arthur Harel, which combines contemporary dance, digital cultures, and post-internet movements, such as the jumpstyle or the radishThe pieces—which explore the relationship between body, community, and politics in the global era—are overwhelmingly powerful. This staging by the dancers perfectly evokes Byung-Chul Han's theories on the society of exhaustion and transparency. The choreographic movements, spasmodic and highly fragmented, both musically and visually, function as a representation of the body's submission to the algorithmic rhythm of late capitalism; there is no fluidity, but rather a succession of points of tension that recall the alienation of the contemporary subject in the face of the machine. In this sense, Berghain It ceases to be a geographical reference to the Berlin club and becomes a non-place where, as Marc Augé would postulate, identity is diluted in the repetition of the techno pulse.
The feeling that our present dwells in a state of enchantment with futures that will never materialize is defined by the term hauntology. Although the term was originally coined by Jacques Derrida in 1993, it was cultural critic Mark Fisher who popularized it in the early 21st century to diagnose the stagnation of contemporary culture. This theoretical framework is articulated on three fundamental pillars. First, the loss of the future, which describes our inability to imagine truly new horizons, forcing us to recycle aesthetics and sounds from the past, as seen in the opening of the lyrical theme sung by Rosalía, alluding to the classical legacy, and in the revival First, there's the specter of what might have been, referring to those 20th-century utopias, like unbridled technological optimism, which, despite their failure, still resonate as specters in contemporary musical creation. And finally, there's the aesthetics of nostalgia, in which the use of broken or granular sounds constantly reminds us that time is "out of place."
In Rosalía's performance, hauntology emerges with overwhelming force by using an industrial club aesthetic from decades ago to narrate a hyper-digitalized 2026 that presents us with the paradox of a music that points to the future, but is still anchored in the past.