Rosalía’s Lux is more than epic Catholic pop – it grapples with a world fraught with complexity and crisis |
I went into Lux primed not to like it. Not because I doubt Rosalía’s virtuosic talents or her intense intellectual curiosity, but because the album’s promotional campaign had already done too much work on my nerves. The rollout was relentless: thirsty reels teasing the album on social media, fashion-forward mysticism, even bringing Madrid’s city centre to a halt – everything about it felt designed to send the message that this is less a set of songs than a global event demanding reverence.
Over the past decade, Rosalía has become Spain’s biggest pop export, and Lux appears to inaugurate her imperial phase. The album debuted at No 1 in five countries, was voted the Guardian’s album of the year, broke streaming records on Spotify, and reached No 4 in the US and UK charts, where non-anglophone pop rarely thrives. Multilingual and stylistically expansive, Lux is saturated with Catholic iconography, with lyrics in no fewer than 13 languages, and circling themes of transcendence, suffering and grace.
None of this is unprecedented in pop music, but the album’s atmosphere of luxury, and framing of spiritual transcendence as a premium experience, sits poorly during a cost of living crisis, especially when the Vatican has been unusually direct recently in its criticism of inequality, economic excess, and the moral alibis of wealth.
“Why is she doing nun-core now?” I grumbled, watching Rosalía iron her clothes in the video for first single