by Ephraim Churchill, staff writer
Rosalía, 33 years old and glowing brighter than ever, has already had multiple eras of her career. With every album release she enters a new era, graces every musical note she attempts, and leaves it behind when her album after that drops. Rosalía has never been content to stand still. Every era of her career feels like a door she opens with a controlled burn, stepping through as the lock melts behind her. And with her newest album titled “LUX”, she doesn’t just open a new door, she appears to have built a cathedral and invited the future inside.
This album doesn’t merely play… it glows, radiating a strange warmth that feels both ancient and hyper-modern, devotional, and daring. In earlier albums, she mixed traditional flamenco music with modern pop
sounds. Whereas LUX stages a different kind of miracle. From the first track titled “Sexo, Violencia, y Llantas” translated to “Sex, Violence and Tires” which opens our album with themes of meditation, nature, suffering, and transcendence.
From the first breath of the record, it’s clear that Rosalía isn’t chasing trends–she’s exorcising them. Layered with more orchestral power ballads than many movie soundtracks such as “Reliquia” and “Da Madrugá” as well as more authentic, drop-to-the-knee worship sounding hymns than many churches have, such as “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti” and “La Perla.” This production shimmers with sacred geometry. Strings blooming like stained glass, percussion striking like ritual, and electronic textures hovering as if lit from within. It’s an album that wants to be felt in the body and contemplated like architecture.
If her previous work taught the world how to dance, LUX teaches it how to kneel without surrendering power. Even as someone who only speaks English, which this album has very little of in any song, what makes LUX astonishing is not just its ambition, it’s the coherence of its ambition. This is not an album of accidents. It is intentional in the way great films and symphonies are intentional: thematically braided, emotionally disciplined, sonically fearless. Light here is not a metaphor for happiness, it’s one for physics.
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The future is bright. And one of the reasons is Rosalía.
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You can hear it refract across songs, bend into shadow, split into colors of grief, desire, sanctity, and hunger. A whisper of a line appears early when Rosalía sings the line “I am made of light” and it feels less like a boast than a thesis. Rosalía’s voice has always been a paradox: a blade and a bomb. On LUX, it becomes something else entirely. An instrument that seems to conduct electricity. She slides from vulnerability to command without becoming oversaturated in either. There are moments when she sings as if she’s alone in a chapel at dawn, dust catching fire in a single beam. There are others when she detonates her words like fireworks in a crowded stadium. The secret is not volume. It’s control. From the song “Berghain” which incorporates aggressive notes of 12th-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen, all the way to a song such as “Porcelana” which balances the harder tones of the album with a softer ballad about being the light of the world.
There is a spiritual element at the album’s emotional center of gravity. But it’s not dogmatic. If there is belief here, it’s belief in transformation, pain into power, tradition into motion, the self into something larger than fear. On one track, she sings in translation a small, devastating phrase about loving “to the bone.” It lands not because it’s poetic, but because it’s honest. Rosalía has always flourished in truth-telling, the kind that stains the hands.
One of the most monumental achievements of LUX is its polyglot heart. Rosalía sings across 13 different languages on LUX. Spanish, Catalan, and English being the most prominent, but the textures at times suggest there are more tongues in sound rather than syntax.
Language is color here, not utility. Every shift in idiom refocuses emotion the way light through a different glass reframes the same sun. LUX is not only a celebration of the beauty of language, but also the canvas for Rosalía to paint with her diverse languages showcasing the magnitude of the spoken word.
And yes, it’s beautiful, offensively beautiful. But beauty here is not ornamental, it’s structural. It holds weight, it moves air, it breaks open silence so something new can live inside it. When she sings that brief line “escojo la llama” which translates to “I choose the flame,” it’s not romance, it’s resolve. But if influence is measured not by imitation but by what becomes possible after you, then Rosalía is already among the most influential artists working today.
She has redrawn the map for Latin pop, not by flattening difference but by amplifying it. She’s shown that a global star can be specific, culturally, and musically and spiritually, and become larger, not smaller, for it. Younger artists don’t copy Rosalía; they inherit permission from her. LUX feels like the album an artist makes when she stops asking for entry and starts issuing invitations. It invites you into a spiritual architecture made of rhythm. It invites you to be brave with beauty. It invites the genre-less future to have a heartbeat. In the quietest moment near the end, there’s a line that says, “la luz me recuerda” which translates to “light remembers me”. It’s a weird sentence. It shouldn’t work. It does. Because by then, you believe it.
By the final note, LUX does something rare: it alters the room you’re in while refusing to leave you. It lingers the way real light does, long after its source is out of sight. This is not just an album. It’s a condition. It’s a temperature shift. It’s a vow. Rosalía has given us a work that refuses to be background. It asks for attention and repays it with revelation. If LUX is indeed about illumination, consider this review a footnote to the obvious:
The future is bright. And one of the reasons is Rosalía.
