If 2025 will be remembered for anything, it will be as the year music went backwards. Oasis flogged us nostalgia by the overpriced bucket-hatful. Radiohead returned in a disappointing incarnation of just another band playing the hits. November welcomes the umpteenth Beatles documentary (and umpteenth tie-in album). The gravitational pull of rock’n’roll’s yesteryears has become a crushing negative energy, dragging us all into a black hole of boomer and Gen X sentimentality.
Amid such depressive regression, how thrilling to encounter a record as fearless, confrontational and confidently unconventional as Rosalía’s Lux, a project that is both a grand folly and a fearless celebration of what music should aspire to be in the 21st century.
That this is something other than just another pop LP is signalled on the cover, where the Catalan artist is dressed as a nun, as if to announce that she has embarked a new path and isn’t for turning.
The extraordinary sounds within bear that out. Across three previous releases, Rosalía has delved into flamenco, electronica and reggaeton – and become a huge star, particularly in the Spanish-speaking world. But she rips up every preconception audiences will have had of her with this breathtaking odyssey into the further reaches of experimental composition.
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It marks her as an heir to Björk – who passes on the baton as she pops up on the rambunctiously odd single Berghain, a track that many have likened to an opera in miniature and that has nothing at all to do with the Berlin club after which it is named; it features the chillwave producer Yves Tumor reciting an expletive-filled Mike Tyson quote from 2002.
“Lux” means light in Latin, though Rosalía offers little in the way of upfront illumination across 15 agreeably baffling tracks (or 18 on physical editions) that see her singing in Spanish, Catalan, Japanese, Ukrainian, Hebrew, Chinese, English and German.
That linguistic ambition is matched by the music, which pivots from minimalist chamber pop to Andrew Lloyd Webber balladry via Aphex Twin-style ambient noodling. It’s stunningly avant-garde, although the initial effect is perhaps overwhelming as Rosalía’s voice flutters in and out of earshot, and strings shriek and soar.
One person’s pioneering is another’s pretentious, and Lux is not for the faint of heart or anyone who feels strongly that pop peaked when Coldplay started to perform with puppets. To that end, there was almost something too metaphorical about Rosalía’s attempt to livestream the launch of the record in Madrid, only for her to get caught in traffic as fans flocked to the event. She was literally bogged down in her own desire to push forward.
As with many challenging and unorthodox undertakings, Lux requires the listener to put in the work. It will help, for instance, if you are familiar with the origin story of Olga of Kyiv, the medieval warrior queen who is the subject of De Madrugá, a string-fuelled chamber-pop oddity that dazzlingly combines lacerating strings, chiming synths and odd panting sounds.
Olga isn’t the only divine matriarch to have a moment in the spotlight. Lux is a concept album about the lives of various female saints, including Hildegard of Bingen; Moses’s older sister, Miriam; and the Sufi mystic Rabi’a al-ʼAdawiyya al-Qaysiyya. (Why no St Brigid, Rosalía?)
“If I could have fit the entire world in a room, in a record, I would have done it if I could. This is what I could do now, which was Lux, which has these stories from around the world,” she explained recently. “Because each saint, it’s from a different place, then there’s a different language used. You can find songs that have some Arabic, songs that have some Chinese, and it all responds to that. Those saints, they are a part of a specific framework. It’s a specific culture, it’s a specific religion.”
But if Lux never even comes close to an easy listen, it rewards time and patience. Its opening track, Sexo, Violencia y Llantas (Sex, Violence and Tyres) is a stark piano piece that builds slowly, swerving from Eurovision-style torch song to Enya-style ethereal pulsations.
An altogether different effect is achieved by Divinize, a beautifully creepy ballad where atonal instruments pushes against Rosalía’s bruised singing and a skittish, uneasy beat.
Rosalía Vila Tobella is clearly not an artist to do things by halves. There are moments when you wonder if she wouldn’t be happier to be making a prog-rock album in 1976. But at a time when so much in music is about looking backwards, how inspiring to have an artist who wants to push on – with results that are by turns thrilling, baffling and splendidly spooky.
