The cover of Rosalía’s fourth studio album, *Lux*, shows the Spanish (Catalan) artist cloaked in a nun’s habit. Beneath the white fabric, she cradles herself. Even the word “habit” resonates as both a symbolic garment and a daily practice, hinting at the religious virtues that underpin this triumphant and extraordinary four-part, 18-song opus.
Unlike the razor-sharp, electronic world of her third Grammy-winning album, *Motomami*, Rosalía’s latest places her inside an orchestra. You won’t find any obvious “hits” here; the focus is her voice and the ensemble-driven lift. *Lux* unfolds as a spiritual odyssey, built from the materials and references Rosalía has gathered and arranged with delicate intention over the past three years.
It is as formidable a journey to make as it is to absorb, and that challenge is the very heart of the project. Far from contemporary pop, each note and lyric demands your full attention; the reward is transcendence, even as the material nudges you to annotate like a philosophy student with a highlighter in hand.
It’s worth remembering she is a conservatory-trained musician who famously attended the Catalonia College of Music, studying vocal flamenco performance in a prestigious program admitting only one student per year. The first solo female artist to win Album of the Year at the Latin Grammys since Shakira in 2006, Rosalía established herself as an aficionado of meaningful experimentation with the ethereal, flamenco-infused world of *El Mal Querer*.
She doubled down on that innovation with *Motomami*, whose boundary-pushing collisions—ranging from reggaeton to pop, hip-hop and beyond—were unlike anything else happening in mainstream music (no matter the language) at the time. It’s why listeners dove headfirst into the icy orchestral chaos of “Berghain,” a four-minute free-fall with Björk and Yves Tumor as the project’s first single.
Rosalía does the unexpected throughout the entirety of *Lux*, challenging listeners not only with a drastic shift in musical direction from *Motomami*, but with a fully realized conceptual script. In promotional interviews, she has cited saints from around the world—often artists or unconventional women—as guiding lights.
However far these references stretch, she fuses all eras, illuminating lessons of societal expectation, personal autonomy, and the tension between devotion and desire. Themes of sainthood thread throughout, but on “Porcelena,” the album’s ethos crystallizes: she accepts that she is simultaneously nothing and the “light of the world.”
We glimpse her understanding of the self and the sacred—its terror, grief, ecstasy, and suffering. These autobiographical flashes arrive in operatic waves. You hear them on songs like “La Perla,” where she calls out a “playboy” as an “emotional terrorist,” and “Focu Ranni,” a wrenching reflection on her broken engagement with reggaetón star Rauw Alejandro:
“No one will throw rice at the sky. There’ll be no one to bless a love he’ll never truly know;
I etched your name on my ribs / but my heart never had your initials.”
The instrumentals are as intricate and lush as her fervent vocal runs, which rise and collapse within seconds. Backed by walls of sound, you feel every tremor of her voice in her most fragile moments.
It makes complete sense that she closes with images of her own funeral. On “Magnolis,” she sings:
“They say if you see death pass by your side / in that long Mercedes / it’ll bring good luck / You’re all here / even my enemies cry today.”
Her voice narrows to a whisper as she sings of this communion between emptiness and divinity, beyond relationships, money, or the mundane. The void is not something to fill, she suggests, but rather it is a direct line to feeling God.
In a world oversaturated with noise, this level of artistic conviction reminds us that the boldest creators resist stasis. The deeper they turn inward, the more the world leans in to listen.
https://variety.com/2025/music/album-reviews/rosalia-lux-album-review-1236570121/