Rosalía is redrawing pop’s map at a shocking tempo. Her first two information, Los Ángeles and El Mal Querer, introduced flamenco into the mainstream; the second fractured the style from its custom, unearthing a pop architect intent on stitching sacred textual content with avenue expression. Then got here MOTOMAMI, a world born of Caribbean warmth and unbridled nerve, cementing her as an experimental auteur burning by seems like a grasp technician. However when the earthly map felt full, she spoke instantly from the heavens: LUX.
The Spanish celebrity’s fourth album is a heartfelt providing of avant-garde classical pop that roars by style, romance, and faith. Organized in 4 actions and sung in 13 languages, its orchestral pop storms down from the skies and leaves, in its thundering aftermath, a discipline information for pop’s seekers, those that consider the solutions to like, want, and artistic function would possibly but be contained in three or 4 minutes at a time. It’s not a dopamine machine like MOTOMAMI, nevertheless it rewards listeners who ache for extra from pop artists: extra feeling, extra danger.
For all its scholarship and borderless histories, LUX isn’t a large homework task; it’s an operatic lament for a brand new era, an beautiful oratorio for the messy coronary heart. Sure, the credit learn like a conservatory (the London Symphony Orchestra; Catalan choirs; MOTOMAMI collaborators Noah Goldstein and Dylan Wiggins; Pharrell; and preparations from Caroline Shaw and Angélica Negrón, to call a number of), however Rosalía’s voice stays at its middle. Together with her as its lodestar, LUX advances like a campaign to beat the mysteries of human existence. On opener “Sexo, Violencia, y Llantas,” she proclaims her plan: “How good it’d be, to return from this Earth, go to Heaven, and are available again to the Earth.” She spends the following hour detailing this course of from begin to end by flamenco pop revelations (“La Rumba Del Perdon”), waltzing insults (“La Perla”), existential operatic swells (“Memoria”), and songs that really feel fully new and genreless (like “Focu’Ranni or “Novia Robotic”).
