Rosalía is 33 years old, the age of Jesus Christ. Her calling to create Lux (2025) came before she reached that age. She spent two years preparing this record. An entire year was devoted solely to its lyrics. She sings in 13 languages in Lux (although Spanish prevails). Had I not read the press articles mentioning this, I might not have noticed it – except for a few drastic contrasts, such as the Japanese lyrics entering the post-chorus in “Porcelana”.
That’s not a critique of the Catalan singer’s diction or pronunciation. If anything, it’s a nod to how she makes the languages organically dissolve into one another. Language transitions are not what I focus on when I listen to Lux. In an album that feels almost essentialistic, one that reaches for the sacred through operatic and baroque musical references, multilingualism becomes a kind of enacted xenoglossy.
The Bible says words hold power. Nevertheless, with all due respect to the effort Rosalía put into writing the lyrics of Lux, I won’t be dissecting them. I don’t think an album sung in 13 languages urges me to. If anything, the presence of so many languages in Lux feels like an act of faith, as if to prove that music, like Spirit or xenoglossy, can move us beyond the limits of comprehension.
Perhaps I’m risking making a fool of myself by praising Lux in case the lyrics turn out to be shit, but like religion, I was enraptured. I wouldn’t be a music writer if I didn’t believe music deserves deeper exploration. Similarly, Rosalía wouldn’t be such a top musician if she didn’t think music could transcend language.
Actually, I almost resent Lux for making me fall back on the conformist cliché that some things are meant to be felt, not explained, but that’s Rosalía for you, especially if you’re not white or European: she can put you in positions you fight a lot not to be. If you’re a Latino pop culture fan, perhaps for you, Rosalía was for years the embodiment of cultural appropriation, for example.
Yet you danced hard to “Con Altura” and “Despechá”. You can begrudge the fact that she, born in the land of those who colonized and exploited Latin America, earned a spotlight in the Latin music scene. Yet you loved El Mal Querer (2018). You may have reasons to question the (privileged) position from which Rosalía creates art, but you can’t say her art is bad.
Nevertheless, there is much to dig into when it comes to Rosalía’s choices for Lux. As I said, multilingualism is one of them. No single language is enough of a vessel. Rosalía conjured as many as she could as if she needed to find the common denominator between all of them, the deity that breathes through all of them.
In Babel (2022), R. F. Kuang’s electrifying novel about young students of the art of translation, lead character Robin reflects on how the pursuit of a single perfect language is futile: “For how could there ever be an Adamic language? The thought now made him laugh. There was no innate, perfectly comprehensible language. There was no candidate, not in English, not in French, who could bully and absorb enough to become one. Language was just different. A thousand different ways of seeing, of moving through the world. No, a thousand worlds within one. And translation, a necessary endeavor however futile, to move between them.”
I quote Babel, an adult fiction hit that draws comparisons to the vibes of Harry Potter, and not to “classic” literature or a linguistic text, because this is the kind of universe Rosalía wants to engage with. “I’m a pop artist,” she told The New York Times, plain and clear.
What could be more pop than religion? “The Pope is pop“, a Brazilian rock band once sang, in a playful denunciation of the pop-culturefication of religious figures. What’s more pop than God? The spiritual universe is not new to Rosalía’s body of work. Pop music, for Rosalía, may even be the medium to bring her closer to God, the mundane vehicle she wants to experience before she reaches the heights. As she sings in “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas”, Lux’s opening track: “First I’ll love the world, then I’ll love God” (oh well, it seems I am dissecting some lyrics. As I said before, Rosalía makes you do things you swore you wouldn’t).
For a pop star like Rosalía, who just three years ago was making TikTok-oriented performances for reggaeton-based tracks, Lux may seem, at first, hard to read as pop. It’s too high-culture-coded for that. Ultimately, that’s just Rosalía once again drawing from humanity’s vast cultural reservoir, turning every world she enters into her own field of play, but this time, with a stronger longing to reach the sacred core of existence through the language of ancient arts.
Is it problematic that Rosalía’s pursuit of the divine, of the universal, is done through aesthetic forms that are essentially white, European, classist, and Christian? In a world that increasingly questions Eurocentrism, and pop itself grows ever more decolonial (as its own previous incursion into reggaeton suggested), it’s at the very least intriguing. Perhaps even provocative.
The concept of “the universal” remains a subject of debate. We can debate anthropology all we want, and yet, some things seem to move us nevertheless: a triumphant string section, a note held for too long. They touch us beyond reason. So we surrender.
Lux’s moodboard word cloud would feature words like “church”, “museum”, “opera”, “sanctuary”, and “music conservatory”. All too classy. Never once does it feel as if Rosalía is trying too hard or as if she studied these worlds to emulate them or to craft something “elevated” as proof of artistry (a proof she doesn’t need). She is just offering this music to the world as just another language of self-expression.
Nonetheless, some moments in Lux betray the hand of a young artist who is not entirely committed to the idea of making a purely “classical” album. Rosalía sounds like old money breathing naturally in this environment. However, punctual pieces by Lux show that she wants to demonstrate her continued engagement with modern textures of electronic music and hip-hop, for example.
These moments are brief, but telling: the “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me” in “Berghain” (a moment that could have fallen out of a Kanye West album), or the glitchy outro of “Reliquia”. Even within the album’s religious and baroque aesthetic, these details work. Just like the drama of confessing sins and the aesthetics of hell are, after all, as integral to Catholic imagery too. The fact that these flashes of “modernity” are rare in Lux makes them even more powerful; however, make no mistake: this is not an album of fleeting gestures or random insertions of new musical elements.
If in Rosalía’s previous album, Motomami (2022), there was a kind of liquidity (a flow of cultural fragments and micro-moments that appear once and never come back, as we wrote), in Lux there’s a particular commitment to structure: not so much in the traditional pop format of verse-chorus-bridge, but in the style of dramatic arcs, with introduction, climax, and resolution.
The album’s most emblematic track is “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti”. The Italian adds credibility to the erudite aesthetics; you’d almost expect Andrea Bocelli to jump in at any time. Here, Rosalía explores new corners of her voice: at times slightly raspy, but not the breathy bedroom-pop rasp popularized by Halsey and her contemporaries. It’s a more lyrical, almost operatic rasp. The song builds gradually, not like a Broadway musical, but like an orchestral crescendo.
To describe Lux through these comparisons is essential; they denote the many forms pop music can take. The forms explored here are refined, steeped in history, reaching back to something ancient and enduring; words I use more for descriptive contrast purposes than for hierarchization of different kinds of art.
What can you do? Sometimes the clichés earn their truth. In a world numbed by formulaic music and on the verge of an algorithmic, AI-fueled collapse, perhaps turning to highbrow art is not regression nor elitism. Perhaps it really does help. In the end, Lux is more than Rosalía’s act of faith in God and in music; it’s her act of faith in people. Only someone with that kind of faith would dare to call Lux pop without fear of casting pearls before swine.