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Last week, Rosalía appeared on a US podcast to discuss her fourth album. At one juncture, the interviewer asked if she didn’t think that Lux was demanding a lot from her listeners: a not entirely unreasonable question, given that it features a song cycle in four “movements”, based on the lives of various female saints and involves the 33-year-old Catalan star singing in 13 different languages to the thunderous accompaniment of the London Symphony Orchestra; and that it sounds nothing whatsoever like its predecessor, 2022’s Motomami. “Absolutely,” she responded, framing Lux as a reaction to the quick-fix dopamine hit of idly scrolling social media: something you had to focus on.
Demanding a lot from her listeners didn’t seem like something Rosalía was terribly bothered about, which is, in a sense, surprising. Pop has seldom seemed more prone to user-friendliness, to demanding as little as it can from its audience, as if the convenience of its primary means of transmission has affected its sound: it occasionally feels as though streaming’s algorithms – always coming up with something new that’s similar to stuff you already know – have started to define the way artists prosecute their careers. Then again, Rosalía has form when it comes to challenging her fanbase: variously infused with reggaeton, hip-hop, dubstep, dembow and experimental electronica, Motomami represented a dramatic pivot away from her 2018 breakthrough, El Mal Querer, a pop overhaul of flamenco that – incredibly – began life as the singer’s college project. It seems oddly telling that the biggest guest star on Lux is Björk, whose distinctive tone appears during Berghain, somewhere in between a resounding orchestral arrangement, Rosalía’s own operatic vocals and the sound of Yves Tumor reprising Mike Tyson’s “I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me” tirade over and over again. It’s hard not to suspect that Rosalía sees Björk as a kindred spirit or even a model, someone who has predicated a decades-long solo career on making artistic handbrake turns through a glossy aesthetic.
Still, the shift in sound between El Mal Querer and Motomami is nothing compared to the leap between the latter and what’s on offer here. Both of Lux’s predecessors were pop albums, albeit hugely adventurous and original ones. A debate is raging about whether or not the contents of Lux could be described as classical music, a question about which Rosalía herself seems undecided – on the waltz-time La Perla, a particularly dramatic swell of strings and brass is followed by the sound of the singer giggling, as if she’s keen to undercut any pretensions. But, whether you want to label it as such or not, Lux certainly sounds closer to classical music than it does to anything in the charts. There are definitely pop elements to these songs: Auto-Tune amid the Bernard Herrmann-ish stabs of strings, roiling kettledrums and flamenco handclaps of Porcelana; rapping on Novia Robot; melodies that you can imagine transposed into a more familiar musical setting, most obviously on the lovely Sauvignon Blanc; the kind of sped-up vocal sample that’s regularly deployed by hip-hop or house producers but that here forms part of an authentically astonishing sonic barrage at the start of Focu ‘Ranni. But these elements never feel central to Lux’s sound. Quite the opposite: they seem like oddly spectral presences, drifting through an alien landscape.
So Lux demands the listener abandon preconceptions and submit themselves to its author’s way of doing things. There’s no question that this is quite a big ask. Lux is a long album; whatever its overarching story may be, it seems almost impossible to follow even with the aid of a lyric sheet that translates the sudden leaps between Spanish, Mandarin, Ukrainian, Latin et al. That said, you get the sense that somewhere in the mix of stuff about God, Catholicism, beatification and transcendence lurks the more earthy theme of an ex-boyfriend getting it in the neck: “gold medal in being a motherfucker”, run some characteristic (Spanish-sung) lines in La Perla, “emotional terrorist … world class fuck-up”.
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But in truth, you don’t need to know what’s going on to find Lux a truly compelling, involving experience. These are uniformly beautiful songs, filled with striking moments – the point in Reliquia where a Michael Nyman-ish string arrangement is suddenly joined by a frantic, glitchy rhythm that recalls Aphex Twin’s take on drum’n’ bass; the whirlpool of strings and wordless vocals at the end of Jeanne; the moment midway through De Madrugá where the orchestra dramatically surges and the song changes key. Rosalía’s vocal performances, meanwhile, are spectacular firework displays of talent: she seems just as comfortable in the presence of fado singers on La Rumba del Perdón as she does rapping or indeed belting as if she’s on stage at the Royal Opera House. Moreover, for all their facility, they’re possessed of an emotional rawness that negates the obvious charge you might level against Lux: that it’s an arid intellectual exercise. Whatever pains have been staked in its making – the learning of languages and the hiring of Pulitzer prize-winning classical composer Caroline Shaw to provide arrangements among them – Lux is too dramatic to feel just like the answer to a clever hypothesis.
It may also be too different and challenging to gain the kind of mass acceptance afforded Motomami and El Mal Querer – although the position of Berghain in the global streaming chart suggests not, and there’s something genuinely buoying about that. In a world where listeners are increasingly encouraged to lean back and let the algorithm and AI do the work for them, it would be hugely encouraging to think that people might embrace an album that asks you to do the exact opposite. If you have to put effort in to appreciate Lux, the effort is repaid: there’s a lesson in there that’s worth taking note of.
