🔗 Share this article

At first glance, this work may look more like a challenging university challenge rather than a new popular music album from a musician whose last hit was a collaboration with an international K-pop star. Broken across 4 separate movements and voiced in 13 tongues, we have a head-spinning orchestral-influenced album exploring female mystique, religious transcendence, and bodily change, often via the lens of different saintly figures. The end of a relationship—a theme handled with grounded honesty elsewhere—soars skyward here, carried by the constant presence of a full orchestra and input from a Pulitzer-winning songwriter among an extensive roll call of collaborators. The pure ambition by itself makes the efforts of other artists appear quite small.

Transcending Scholarly Exercise

That Lux manages to transcend overly intellectual posturing feels almost miraculous, and sole praise going to Rosalía. While this is not her first album to blend historical sounds with modern styles, its stakes feel far higher here, with the tightrope walk far more pronounced. What truly elevates her fourth album, beyond its complex tunes, rich arrangements, and inherent theatricality, proves to be a core sense of playfulness. Much like the legendary Björk during her peak, there is a wondrous quality to the vocalist's voice that pulls you up in its whirlwind. Even when she's tearing hearts in two, the listener still desire to be alongside her through the ride.

A Signature Moment of Exuberance

This playful energy shines brightly on a stirring Italian song inspired by Saint Clare. It bathes in a string-drenched melancholy over several minutes. Then, all the music falls away, and we hear a gleeful giggle and a comment prior to a comically over-the-top string crescendo crashes in with comedic impact. The song immediately shifts into the wild track featuring galloping strings, a powerful choir, and a cameo appearance from the artist herself.

"The magic with Lux lies in the listener never quite know—or even wish to know—what you will go to next."

Almost each song ends in a completely different point from where it started. A track explores the fleeting nature of fame with a delicate orchestration only to disintegrating in digital chaos. Elsewhere, a cut echoing the artist's earlier trap-infused style begins out moody and brooding, with prowling vocals, until sudden traditional handclaps and a heavenly chorus arrive to soften its jagged corners.

The Balance Of Art and Pop

A key balancing act on Lux involves straddling the line of radical experimentation and broad accessibility. This is little coincidence that the album has achieved the artist's first work to break into the Top 5 of major charts: at its core a collection of utterly undeniable hits. A song performed primarily in English swells around a refrain that seems to collect more and more infectious melodies while it spins upward. This feat is echoed on a different expansive ballad that grows and constricts, weaving multiple melodies like an intricate tapestry.

• A dance-infused number seduces via its playful, Disney-adjacent flair and a chant-along chorus.
• In its words, it aligns the pop culture impact of other breakup anthems, eviscerating a former partner labeled an "psychological bully".
• Throughout the album, the singing have a sharp smile, akin to a storybook figure concealing a knife: "Gold medal in being a scoundrel / You have won the trophy of letdown."

A Maximalist Banquet for the Soul

Lux is pop on a grand level, a hungry reach for capital-A artistry in an era of looming AI-generated sameness. It rejects self-absorption for sublime elevation, crafting an over-the-top spectacle that skillfully controls its own inherent excess. It is an abundant well of hidden treasure that requires time to completely explore but doesn't seem like hard work. While other major releases of the year seemed like a meager scraps, Lux is a lavish banquet where the characters at it, perhaps tipsy on sacred drink, flutter between discussions about historical saints, the galvanizing feeling of soul-shattering grief, and common gossip about useless partners. It is a contemporary theatrical production from music's truly endlessly creative visionary.