On her fourth album, LUX, the Spanish superstar builds a world where high art, ancient texts, and Mike Tyson quotes coexist in perfect harmony.
There are a few moments sprinkled throughout Rosalía’s stunning, triumphant fourth LP LUX where she offers a peek behind the curtain. The orchestral bombast, chamber precision, operatic flourishes, and nods to 12th-century “Hagiografias” give the album an earned seriousness. Every once in a while, though, Rosalía cracks a smile. It’s in this play that the Spanish flamenco stylist turned pop auteur thrives as one of the most intoxicating stars in music.
Take Yves Tumor’s verse on “Berghain,” where the singer interrupts a stirring string ballad with post-apocalyptic flourishes and lyrics that recall the poetry that appears on ancient busts dedicated to the fleeting nature of love. The timpani roars and horn blasts signal the end credits, but Tumor comes through and offers a different spin on the ethereal fickleness of love. Tumor pulls from the poetry of one Mike Tyson, singing on repeat: “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me,” a call back to an infamous outburst from the boxer. Rosalía is pop’s most exciting creator because she’s always subverting expectations without showing the seams behind her decision-making. This isn’t being weird for weirdness’ sake or writing a catchy hook to satiate label heads and radio programmers. Rather, each idea on LUX exists to reaffirm the central ideas of the album; namely, as she explained to Billboard, it’s an album “made from love and curiosity.” She added, “I’ve always wanted to understand other languages, learn other music, learn from others about what I don’t know.”
With LUX, Rosalía confirms her status as a shapeshifter of the highest order, bringing the musical landscape to her vision as opposed to waiting for the world to catch up. She’s critically adored and a commercial wonder; LUX is aiming for a top 5 entry on the Billboard 200 and currently sits comfortably at No.4 on the Apple Music charts. This is music that doesn’t bend to mainstream whims, and yet, Rosalía continuously dominates the cultural conversation every time she drops an album.
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In an interview with The New York Times’ excellent Popcast, the singer spoke about a revelation she had while listening to someone speak about two different types of confidence. On the one hand, there’s the idea that you’re going to succeed. That concept can give you the push to experiment, push boundaries, and work on ideas that others might ignore. There’s a second kind of confidence, though, which is what Rosalía tapped into to make LUX. “There’s another confidence, which maybe is the lack of fear of failure. I think there’s surrender in this approach,” she explains. “I think it’s the first time that I allowed myself to make an album from this place. Complete surrender — this is what I actually needed to say and sing about and do.”
The way I hear it, LUX is both an album that strips decoration and flourish to reveal only the essentials, while also gravitating towards an emotional excess that occasionally overwhelms the sonic ambitions of the project. At times, Rosalía can’t help but bring in an entire orchestra to cue meteoric cymbal crashes and string swells that soar like thousands of fireflies moving across the night sky. This is music of passion, not only for lovers real and imagined, but for music and art itself. Part of the joy of this album is in tracing the artists that move Rosalía like Rosalía moves us.
There’s an excerpt from a Patti Smith interview on “La Yugular,” in which the songwriter says: “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. It’s just like going through one door. One door isn’t enough. A million doors aren’t enough.” There’s something beautiful in the idea that the philosophy of this album isn’t spoken by Rosalía but by a boundary-pushing songwriter who arrived before her. “A million doors aren’t enough,” LUX asks for at least a million and one.
As pop music becomes sterilized and curated to fit needs and desires we didn’t even know we had, an artist like Rosalía is bound to resonate both commercially and with the few critics that still exist. She shoots for the moon with every hand, no matter how many hearts she’s carrying or who holds the queen of spades. She’s like Kevin Costner in Tin Cup, knowing that taking the risk is a reward in and of itself. She’s too stubborn to back off any idea that teases her, and we’re lucky she has this quality. It’s what’s most exciting about Rosalía in 2025. She is, in many ways, a fully-formed pop star, with four smash hit albums under her belt. Yet, she’s indescribable, elusive, and slippery.
LUX is the latest iteration of the Rosalía experiment, but it doesn’t describe her any more than MOTOMAMI does. There’s a brilliance in restlessness that exists not for its own sake, but to get better. As Rosalía explained in that Billboard interview, “This is my truth. This is where I am now.” As that truth evolves, changes, morphs, and refracts, so will she. Enjoy LUX for what it is, but don’t expect anything like it again; at least not from Rosalía.
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