Day 183: Rosalia – LUX
Album cover courtesy of Columbia Records
I was watching the Brit Awards this weekend and dare I say, it was leaps and bounds ahead of the Grammys this year. It’s on a Saturday first of all, which means I don’t have to take a Monday off to watch it late at night. Second, the quality is high and the artists/albums/songs that are nominated have variety. And third, the performances are great – there was big hitters like Harry Styles, Mark Ronson and RAYE, with surprise appearances from Bjork, Dua Lipa and Ghostface Killah. But none of the performances topped Rosalia.
I’ve been saving Rosalia’s 2025 album LUX because I’ve been waiting for the right moment. I just kept hearing that she alone is heralding the return of art pop and that it’s the album of the year. But her Brits performance was so good that I think the right moment just has to be today, I don’t care if I have the right amount of time or energy, it’ll just have to do.
Rosalia recorded LUX with the London Symphony Orchestra and released it in November last year to rave reviews. For a while, it seemed like everyone was talking about it – even if you’d never listened to her, someone might have told you that she sings in 14 different languages and blends pop with classical music. It’s also a concept album based around different saints. By any metric, managing to pull off what she was doing is a feat and a half, and I have to admit I was a bit sceptical. Listening to it, I had no reason to be.
Rosalia is a Spanish pop star who rose to fame from collaborating with The Weeknd on a bachata song called “La Fama” in 2021, and her most recent album “MOTOMAMI” was a more traditional pop album with her on the cover in the buff, so I don’t think too many people were expecting her to come out with a divine concept album of classical and avant garde pop. But she really came out swinging. She said, "I feel like God has given me so much, the least I could do is make an album for him. I'm giving back."
It draws inspiration from saints like Teresa de Jesus, Sun Bu’er, and Hildegard Von Bingen, but the album also draws from Rosalia’s personal life and the breakdown of her engagement that she went through before she started working on LUX. The genres range from opera to flamenco to fado to classical music to things that feel like you can’t even assign a genre to them, and the album hops seamlessly from one thing to something completely different.
The main part about it is that it feels risky. It feels like an album that could have gone spectacularly wrong, had it not been as flawlessly executed. The starring role in the album goes to her vocals and the lyrics, all of which are presented in different languages – she’d studied new languages, sketched out what she wanted and worked with linguists to refine the lyrics create songs in languages she’s not even fluent in. And she highlighted that all of it was done without AI.
It’s not an album that’s made to be easily palatable. It’s difficult, you need to really work with it and look at the translations and listen intently to get to the heart of it. It doesn’t feel like music that’s meant to please the masses and go viral, which is what I think so many of us are craving right now. And I’m over the moon that there are mainstream artists who are willing to take risks at this level.
LUX is a breath of fresh air, and so is Rosalia for that matter. 9.5/10 to LUX.