When Rosalía announced her fourth studio album, “Lux,” the world erupted into chaos. Fans across every social media platform voiced their excitement and overwhelming support. With a brief glance at Rosalía’s career and her art, it is not difficult to understand why.
Rosalía has always been an artist willing to experiment in her work. In her most recent endeavor, she sings in 13 languages, painting her as a once-in-a-generation talent. Not only does Rosalía demonstrate a mastery of language and lyricism, but also of genre; from flamenco to electronic, she truly remains an enigma. Her talent and dedication to her craft have never felt so palpable as they do in “Lux.” What makes this album so powerful is its intensity, both within itself and beyond it. Every beat and every silence feels deliberate. Rosalía plays with sound the way light refracts through glass — bending it, breaking it, distorting everything around it. Listening to “Lux” feels less like hearing an album and more like being dropped into a controlled experiment.
The album is thematically structured around saints and mystics from different parts of the world and different belief systems, including Judeo-Christian, Islamic, and Taoist traditions. The themes of the album are just as diverse, as Rosalía explores ideas of devotion and desire, mortality and death, completely reimagining spirituality by using different religions and their figures to navigate the human condition.
In an interview with Lyndsey Havens for Billboard, Rosalía explained that she envisioned “four movements” for the structure of this album. The first movement would symbolize a departure from purity, the second was meant to evoke being in gravity, befriending the world, the third would be about grace and being friends with God, and the final movement would represent a closing or returning.
Following this structure, let’s start with the first movement. The songs in the first quarter of the album are abrasive and at times deliberately overwhelming. “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas” and “Reliquia,” both sung in Spanish, introduce the album with a rejection of restraint. Both are infused with an urgency that almost feels confrontational. “Divinize,” sung in Catalan and English, toys the line between devotion and obsession, while “Porcelana,” sung in Japanese, Spanish, Latin, and English, leans into fragility and layers languages until identity itself feels unstable. Lastly, “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” sung in Italian, closes this movement with an emotional rupture, suggesting that innocence has already been abandoned.Together, these songs establish the album’s central conflict: the collision between the sacred and the profane, which forces listeners to confront the excess of desire and the loss of control that comes with it.
The second movement represents the departure from purity. It stands as a navigation of how to exist within the world after that loss. “Berghain,” sung in German, Spanish, and English, establishes the movement with its technical intensity, blending languages to represent a physical and emotional surrender. “La Perla” and “Mundo Nuevo,” both sung in Spanish, soften the rest of this movement while simultaneously exploring intimacy, vulnerability, and connection as acts of survival for human existence. “De Madrugada,” sung in Spanish and Ukrainian, captures a quiet disorientation, a back-and-forth between belonging and isolation. These songs focus on learning how to move within the world instead of remaining stagnant in its gravitational pull.
The third movement marks a thematic shift. While earlier songs explore desire and gravity, this section of the album turns toward grace. The sounds become more restrained and the lyrics are more reflective as “Lux” begins to explore devotion as negotiation instead of an act of submission. “Dios Es Un Stalker,” sung in Spanish, frames divinity as something intimate, and at times, unsettling, narrowing the gap between the human and the divine. “La Yuglar,” sung in Spanish and Arabic, sounds almost ceremonial, while “Sauvignon Blanc,” sung in Spanish, is more grounded, as it portrays grace as an everyday ritual and not something that is unattainable. This movement feels like a breath of fresh air within an album that demands breathlessness from its listeners.
The final movement is both a closure and a return. These tracks carry a sense of release, one that can only be obtained through acceptance. “La Rumba Del Perdón,” sung in Spanish, symbolizes forgiveness as something active and embodied, blending movement and emotion to illustrate a new beginning. “Memória,” sung in Portuguese and Spanish, is the most reflective song of “Lux,” reminiscing the past, remembering losses without turning into regret. The album closes with “Magnolias,” sung in Spanish, a gentle exit to an auditory dimension, as Rosalía reinforces the idea that transformation is not a perfect nor a clean process; it’s frustrating and lonely, as are all the bad parts of the human experience.
“Lux” is truly a masterpiece. The ideas, themes, and hard work that went into it have been executed perfectly. Rosalía has always excelled at creating albums that refuse comfort and predictability, but in my opinion “Lux” is her strongest work to date. The way each song pushes further into experimentation, using sound and structure to reflect the album’s spiritual and emotional weight, is nothing short of extraordinary.
Image credit: Columbia Studios
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