Rosalía ‘Lux’ review: an astonishingly ambitious opus

If pop stars in 2025 are listening to those around record label boardroom tables, they’d understand to stay in a comfortable, familiar and listenable lane. Rosalía – to the delight of anyone giving 45 minutes of their time to her astounding new album Lux – must have been washing her hair on the day of that particular Zoom call. Or was hanging out with Björk and the London Symphony Orchestra.

The Catalan singer’s last album, 2022’s MOTOMAMI, was hardly pop-by-numbers. That beat-heavy, Burial-sampling triumph set her apart from her pop contemporaries with a masterful mix of reggaeton, pop, techno and more. But if her last album showed Rosalía to be existing on the thrilling fringes of 2020s pop, Lux seems to suggest she’s currently largely uninterested in the genre as a whole.

Across this remarkable album, she sings in 13 languages, employs the help of the London Symphony Orchestra and creates something stunningly singular. The only thing connecting lead single ‘Berghain’ (featuring Björk and Yves Tumor) with the pounding techno world-famous Berlin club it’s named after is the sense of transcendence to its sweeping strings and dramatic chorus of voices. Björk agrees, singing: “This is divine intervention.”

Rosalía has been reluctant to call Lux classical music in the traditional sense, but its fingerprints are all over the record, not least due to the album being separated into four ‘movements’. The first, from soaring opener ‘Sexo, Violencia y Llantas’ to the warmer, bright ‘Reliquia’, is an otherworldly introduction that presents its ideas in Japanese, Catalan, Latin, Spanish, English and Italian. Elsewhere, she sings in Mandarin, Arabic, Ukrainian and beyond across three further movements that make up an album that is both laser focused and undefinable.

Turning towards classical music and employing an orchestra could lead a pop star into formulaic string sections that beg for an emotional response. Instead, Lux sees Rosalía splicing together thumping, claustrophobic drums (‘Divinize’), chugging bass (‘Dios Es Un Stalker’) and chopped-up vocals (‘Focu ‘Ranni’) together with the LCO’s heft. It also doesn’t dilute her remarkable voice, which shows itself to be stronger than ever, even with this striking and busy new backdrop.

The album is also understandably lyrically opaque given the number of languages employed, so Yves Tumor’s reprisal of Mike Tyson’s immortal line (“I’ll fuck you ‘til you love me”) on ‘Berghain’ sticks out deliciously. Dig into the lyric sheet, and the apparent twists of a knife towards an ex on ‘La Perla’ (described as a “world-class fuck up”, “walking red flag”, “emotional terrorist”, “nasty piece of work” and more) are delightfully at odds with the song’s light and airy musical strut.

“That’s gonna be the energy,” Rosalía giggles into the mic to diffuse the tension after an apocalyptically intense ending to movement one with ‘Mio Cristo’. Despite the top-line news of her collaboration with an orchestra, Lux isn’t a record that’s bogged down in its own seriousness despite its grandeur and scale. It also doesn’t want to be entirely out of time for the sake of it – there’s hyper-modern vocal production and hip-hop cadences to both her and her guests’ voices – but instead stand completely alone. It’s a vision emphatically achieved, and laid out through the voice at the end of ‘La Yugular’: “Seven heavens? Big deal! / I wanna see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousandth heaven / You know, it’s like… break on through the other side!”

Though the release of Lux is undoubtedly an anti-commercial move on Rosalía’s part, the presence of ‘Berghain’ on the UK’s Trending Chart upon release shows a genuine hunger from fans to put in as much care and time to listening to this music as was clearly poured into it, and to follow her on this fascinating journey away from pop. Considering the hours she must have put in on Duolingo, lending a close, curious ear to the most unique album of the year – the anti-easy listening – is the least we could do.