The easy thing for Rosalía would have been to follow up 2022’s successful Motomami, which placed her on the brink of superstardom, with a quick album that walked that same path: Songs that treaded the line between her flamenco Spanish roots and Latin and reggaetón influences. It was a formula that yielded hits like “Despechá,” Rosalía’s take on merengue, and “La Fama,” her take on bachata alongside The Weeknd. The set provided an unlikely segue from her stunning but niche-appealing El Mal Querer, to a broad audience who embraced Rosalía and her sound with cult-like passion.
It stands to reason, then, that something along those lines would follow in quick succession.
Instead, fans waited for two and a half years for LUX, an album that not only breaks parameters for Rosalía, but for the musical landscape as a whole. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, it’s an ambitious, complex, sprawling orchestral and operatic ouvre of 18 tracks, performed in 13 different languages, where Rosalía pushes her vocal prowess into untested waters. This isn’t your tried-and-done collection of pop songs set to symphonic arrangements, but rather a new take on pop (or is it classical?) that tests the limits of what genre is and where it falls in the spectrum of musical production and consumption especially in an era of fast-food music that’s quantified and discarded with grim abandon.
“Sexo, violencia y llantas” (Sex, Violence and Tires), the provocatively titled opener to Lux, starts with a piano intro that evokes a classical piano étude — a cross between Bach and Chopin — then gives way to Rosalía’s vocals set to a sustained acoustic bass line that final crashes in choruses and full string orchestra. The track ebbs and flows in rhythm, pacing and BPM’s, full of rubattos and crescendos, sounding every bit like a classical music composition, except it quite isn’t. The opening line – “Quién pudiera vivir entre los dos, primero amaré el mundo y luego amaré a Dios” (How nice it’d be to live between them both, first I’ll love the world, then I’ll love God) — establishes the foundation of an album and an artist tied to the terrestrial but aspiring to the spiritual and sublime, and actually reaching them more than once.
Lux keeps you on your toes. Divided into four movements, yet another nod to its classical ground, it nevertheless doesn’t adhere to the tradition of a single tempo or mood per movement, but instead veers from arrangements and styles in dizzying manner. Listen carefully, though, and you’ll find the “intentional structure” Rosalía sought to create throughout the album. “I was clear that I wanted four movements,” she told Billboard in her cover story. “I wanted one where it would be more a departure from purity. The second movement, I wanted it to feel more like being in gravity, being friends with the world. The third would be more about grace and hopefully being friends with God. And at the end, the farewell, the return.”
Does Lux follow the rules of classical composition? It doesn’t mean to, and sometimes, it runs all over the place (we can only imagine the Grammys and Latin Grammys discussing what category to place the album and tracks into). “Porcelana,” for example, sounds like four different segments glued together without much rhyme or reason. But Rosalía’s voice is irresistible, capable of going through pianissimos to forte with ease and support. Only a trained voice could deliver this tour de force, and you keep listening, rivetted, until the very end, moving from “Porcelana,” with its traces of reggaetón, urban and flamenco, to “Mio Cristo Piange Diamante,” a bona fide aria performed in Italian.
There are decided commercial nuggets here. “La Perla,” performed with Mexican trio Yahrtiza y su Esencia (with Yahritza’s soprano voice beautifully rising to the task of singing with Rosalía), is a deliciously naughty dis track aimed at a former lover and arranged as a waltz, both quaint and incisive. And “Dios Es Un Stalker” is as catchy and rousing as a mid tempo pop hit can be.
But this is an album that defies convention, arrangement and structure. Challenging but exquisite, we hope it forces others to delve deeper into their art, and make us wait just a little bit more if it means making us listen again and again — not because we’re immediately hooked, but because we want to discover more.
