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I went into Lux primed not to like it. Not because I doubt Rosalía’s virtuosic talents or her intense intellectual curiosity, but because the album’s promotional campaign had already done too much work on my nerves. The rollout was relentless: thirsty reels teasing the album on social media, fashion-forward mysticism, even bringing Madrid’s city centre to a halt – everything about it felt designed to send the message that this is less a set of songs than a global event demanding reverence.
Over the past decade, Rosalía has become Spain’s biggest pop export, and Lux appears to inaugurate her imperial phase. The album debuted at No 1 in five countries, was voted the Guardian’s album of the year, broke streaming records on Spotify, and reached No 4 in the US and UK charts, where non-anglophone pop rarely thrives. Multilingual and stylistically expansive, Lux is saturated with Catholic iconography, with lyrics in no fewer than 13 languages, and circling themes of transcendence, suffering and grace.
None of this is unprecedented in pop music, but the album’s atmosphere of luxury, and framing of spiritual transcendence as a premium experience, sits poorly during a cost of living crisis, especially when the Vatican has been unusually direct recently in its criticism of inequality, economic excess, and the moral alibis of wealth.
“Why is she doing nun-core now?” I grumbled, watching Rosalía iron her clothes in the video for first single Berghain, flanked by an imposing chorus and orchestra. A revival of (conspicuously white) national-Catholic aesthetics seems like the last thing the world needs, especially laundered through someone with Rosalía’s reach. Her ascent has made her a one-woman soft-power campaign for Spanish culture, the undisputed sovereign of la Marca España (Brand Spain, a government initiative) on the global pop stage.
And yet, once I spent time with the record, and the PR fog began to clear, it became obvious that Lux is doing something more interesting and unsettling than lavish ecclesiastical pop. Beneath the bombast and heavy-handed symbolism lies not a sermon but an inquiry into what it means to inhabit a world of unravelling assumptions.
Crisis today is no longer just a temporary moment of exception, but an all-encompassing condition – a point driven home in 2022 when the Collins Dictionary named “permacrisis” its word of the year. Daily life is saturated with moral urgency, and our values are perpetually “under threat”. The cataloguing of plagues – genocide, war, climate breakdown, inflation, displacement – now feels less like diagnosis and more like content tagging for the almighty algorithm. It was precisely this convergence of uncertainty and moralising that sociologist Ronald Inglehart studied for decades. He argued that existential insecurity pushes societies toward authoritarianism: to the upholding of traditional power hierarchies, moral rigidity, religious sanctimony and the patriarchal social order.
Spain is no exception. Over the past decade, a constellation of ultra-conservative actors has moved from the margins to the centre of public life, largely via digital tools. These groups operate as “moral entrepreneurs”: politically savvy and highly mobilised, they frame themselves as embattled defenders of life, order and truth against a hostile secular world. When I first loaded Rosalía’s Berghain video on YouTube, the advertisement before it played was from the Spanish bishops’ conference, titled You too can be a saint – quietly confirming that sanctity, too, is now delivered algorithmically.
These forces feed off a Spanish rage-bait cycle of high-level corruption scandals and judicial politicisation. The buzzword here recently (as it is elsewhere) is “polarisation”, but the folk history behind it is that of the civil war between las dos Españas (the two Spains): red versus black, Nacionales v Republicanos, Cain v Abel. Rosalía, however, wants to elevate her gaze from such a binary worldview and study the whole in all its contradictions.
Lux opens not with a declaration, but with a desire: to live between the two (“Quién pudiera vivir entre los dos”), loving both God and the Earth’s hedonic pleasures. It is far from an accident. Rosalía must be one of very few global pop stars who conscientiously conducts scholarly research before songwriting: indeed her breakthrough 2018 album El Mal Querer doubled as her thesis at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, and received academic honours. That intellectualism carries through to Lux. Doubling as an archive of female mystics, each song draws on figures such as Saint Teresa of Ávila, Rabia al-Adawiyya, Sun Bu’er or Hildegard von Bingen – women for whom devotion, authority, eroticism and transcendence were never neatly separable.
Lux is exhilarating in its refusal to settle. Reliquia, the album’s globetrotting second track, twists spritely strings and vocal snippets into unrecognisable shapes before bursting into ecstatic rhythms. When Rosalía sings “No soy una santa, pero estoy blessed” (“I’m not a saint, but I am blessed”), the line lands with the deliberate thud of heretical subversion: divinisation without ascent. This is one of the “abominable heresies” for which the 17th-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from both Judaism and Catholicism. Writing in the long shadow of the Inquisition that shaped his family’s forced conversion and exile, he proposed that God and nature are one and the same: that there is no hierarchy, no outside – only a single, endlessly differentiating “substance”.
At its most compelling, Lux projects its dense religious themes on to a maximalist sonic palette, where the sacred is not opposed to the profane, but crowded with it. In Divinize, Rosalía finds liberation not through escape from the body but through deeper entanglement within it. On Porcelana, fragility, fear and ferocity drive a constantly evolving tension. “Ego sum nihil/ego sum lux mundi” (“I am nothing/I am the light of the world”) she sings in Latin, softly punctuated by simmering flamenco clapping – an alchemy as powerful as anything I’ve heard this year.
These are the moments when Lux comes into focus, when easy dualities are gradually unpacked to reveal a multitude: not two opposed forces at opposite ends of a spectrum, but countless cohabiting ones in constant tension. This is evident in the album’s sprawling liner notes and production credits, Rosalía’s singular talents pushed forward through careful collaboration.
It is not a perfect album: the more traditional pieces occasionally veer into excess or preciousness, and its avoidance of politics can feel less principled than insulated – at a moment when reactionary, inquisitorial projects are no longer marginal but enjoy direct access to power. Still, Lux gestures toward something more demanding than simple resolution: in the chorus of album highlight La Yugular, an all-encompassing love swells until it abolishes heaven and hell alike. The song ends with Rosalía collapsing scale again and again (“the entire galaxy fits in a drop of saliva”), to reveal the self as a site of both immensity and compression, where the strain of containing multitudes within a single body carries its own spiritual charge.
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Carlos Delclós is a sociologist and writer based in Barcelona
