Divine Intervention: Rosalía’s LUX Rewrites the Pop Canon

Jessica Toal

Over seven short years, Rosalía has made a habit of kicking holes in pop’s rulebook. The Barcelona-born shapeshifter turned her graduate thesis into El Mal Querer, a modernist flamenco landmark; then detonated the boundaries again with 2022’s MOTOMAMI, a gleeful centrifuge of reggaeton, cumbia, glitch, and hip-hop that topped charts and year-end lists while sounding like nothing else in rotation. When that world tour ended and the noise faded, the question was simply: what on earth could come next?

LUX, her fourth album, answers by gazing upward. Rather than retrace prior steps, Rosalía harnesses her classical training from the Catalonia College of Music and builds a new stage entirely: four movements, sung across a dizzying thirteen languages, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, and threaded with arrangements from Pulitzer winner Caroline Shaw (alongside contributions from Angélica Negrón, Noah Goldstein, Dylan Wiggins, Pharrell, and more). On paper it reads like a conservatory recital. In the ear, it’s something rarer – an avant-classical pop epic with a pulse. 

The opening movement sets the cosmology. “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas” arrives like a proclamation—part prayer, part provocation—before the album’s lead single, “Berghain,” tears through the ceiling. It riffs on Verdi’s Dies Irae as strings rasp like serrated knives and a German chorus chants dread into the room; then Björk drops in, cool as a prophet: “the only way to save us is through divine intervention.” The feeling isn’t club euphoria so much as transcendence: a rave in a cathedral.

Rosalía places her voice at the center of the storm. It’s stronger and stranger than ever—operatic in scale, street-smart in phrasing—sliding from Catalan to Japanese to Italian without losing bite. “Reliquia” is the record’s first true gasp: a chamber quartet chopped into an unrecognisable electronic lattice while she studies the bruise of loving too hard. “Take a piece of me, keep it for when I’m gone / I’ll be your treasure, I am your relic.” The line lands as thesis and offering.

If LUX sounds like a crusade for meaning, it’s also a diary of upheaval. Across the three years it took to assemble, Rosalía ended her engagement to Rauw Alejandro, changed management to Jonathan Dickins, and prepped for her acting turn in Euphoria. Those tremors surface everywhere. “La Perla” is a waltzing evisceration—she calls an ex an “emotional terrorist” and, with lethal poise, keeps dancing. “Focu ’Ranni” (on CD and vinyl editions) pairs a desolate melody with scrambled voice and the image of a bride walking away from the altar; she’s said the song nods to Saint Rosalia of Palermo, who fled marriage for God.

That quest for the divine isn’t abstract; it’s intimate, sometimes wry. “Sauvignon Blanc” promises asceticism with a wink—“I will listen to my God / I will throw away my Jimmy Choos”—while “Dios es un stalker” turns obsession into a crooked prayer over clean bass and choral filigree. “Divinize” thumps, hungry and stratospheric: “Bruise me up, I’ll eat all of my pride / I know that I was made to divinize.” Even when the orchestra swells, the production stays hypermodern; hip-hop cadences flash through the arias, and chugging drums keep the incense from getting thick.

Rosalía frames forgiveness as discipline rather than surrender. “La Rumba del Perdón” moves like a flamenco parable—street-corner wisdom braided with family myth—arguing that pardon can be an act of power “when power beats out love.” Elsewhere she weighs grief against gratitude. “Memoria” audits what the hurricane left standing; closer “Magnolias” accepts the finite with a hush: “What I never did in my life, you’ll do when I’m dead.” The album signs off with a 1976 Patti Smith recording urging artists to smash their own doors—an almost too-perfect encapsulation of Rosalía’s impulse to keep breaking through.

If all this sounds heavy, she refuses to be crushed by concept. There’s play in the edges: a giggle at the mic after the apocalyptic “Mio Cristo,” a satirical infomercial’s gleam in “Novia Robot,” a Madonna Instagram salute (“I can’t stop listening! You are a true visionary!!!”). The point isn’t reverence for capital-C Classical; it’s using concert music’s scale to enlarge pop’s emotional bandwidth. The “bangers” are here—they just bloom in unexpected climates.

To hear LUX as intended, follow the artist’s dare: headphones, darkness, no feeds. “The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” she said. What emerges is audacious yet accessible, an oratorio of heartbreak and hunger that treats desire as a holy problem and creativity as its unruly solution. Plenty of stars reinvent; few build a sanctuary and invite you to sit still long enough to feel the air change.

Rosalía once described her practice as a pendulum: inventing language on MOTOMAMI, chiseling it into stone on LUX. That feels right. This album doesn’t chase the algorithm; it redraws the map, then lights it from within. Turn off the lights, lean in, and let one of our most singular artists take you there and back again.