For ROSALÍA, her fourth full-length album <i>LUX</i> only has “little pieces” of her in the lyrics of its songs—and she prefers it that way. “I think the best fiction has this blurry line, the sweet spot between what’s personal and what’s universal, what’s detailed and what’s abstract, what’s implicit and what’s explicit,” the Spanish star tells Apple Music. “It’s both. Because I wrote it, there has to be some sort of truth for me in it. But at the same time, I think it’s much more about the other than about myself.”
The “other,” in this case, is a group of saints—Saint Rose of Lima, Anandamayi Ma, Hildegard von Bingen, Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya, and other martyrs across cultures, centuries, and continents—that ROSALÍA voraciously studied in the wake of her third album, 2022’s <i>MOTOMAMI</i>. Instead of immediately writing about the emotional turmoil she’d weathered in its aftermath—a period that included the end of her engagement to former collaborator Rauw Alejandro—she found the muses of her next project in theology books. After immersing herself in the stories of these women of faith, ROSALÍA blended their experiences, and their tongues, with hers. “Where did they come from? What was the language that would be spoken there?” she says. “There were a lot of women that were extremely interesting to me that were nuns, they were poets. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to read what they actually wrote. I’m going to try to explain these stories.’”
Across <i>LUX</i>, ROSALÍA sings in multiple languages—her native Spanish and Catalan, but also Arabic, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Italian, Ukrainian, and German, among others—to invoke these saints while telling stories of flower-strewn funerals, doomed romance, unrequited love, and crises of faith in multiple forms. If 2018’s <i>EL MAL QUERER</i> introduced her singular fusion of flamenco and pop to the world, and <i>MOTOMAMI</i> brought reggaetón into the mix, <i>LUX</i> builds on that work from a high-drama, operatic foundation, one that pairs her lyrical intensity with vocal prowess and orchestral flourish. A cajón and handclaps blend seamlessly with urbano bass, Auto-Tune, and somber strings, often with many or all of these elements weaving throughout the same track (as they do on “De Madrugá”). Her voice soars over each flamenco run with ease (“La Rumba Del Perdón”), only to growl over sinister cello (“Porcelana”), breathlessly trip through a softly strummed waltz (“La Perla”), or reach the rafters of any grand opera house (the exquisite “Reliquia”; her version of an aria, “Mio Cristo Piange Diamante”; the severe and surreal “Berghain,” which features Björk and Yves Tumor).
ROSALÍA worked with the London Symphony Orchestra to give <i>LUX</i> the symphonic heft it deserves, and at times, the gravity of the undertaking felt insurmountable. “I definitely had chills so many times while recording vocals,” she says. “I don’t think I ever cried so much making an album. I don’t think I’ve ever cried so much recording vocals. I think that I didn’t maybe want to go through this before. I was like, ‘I’m not ready.’ I know I had to do an album like this, but I wasn’t ready.”
Whether or not she realized it at the time, she was, indeed, ready for <i>LUX</i> and all it entails. It’s the destination she’s been writing towards, uninhibited by instrumentation, devastation, or language. “<i>MOTOMAMI</i> was minimalist,” she says. “This is maximalism.”
