Rosalía's Lux: A Sonic Exploration of the World's Complexity and Crisis
The album's lavish promotional campaign may have done too much work on my nerves, but once I spent time with Lux, the PR fog began to clear. Beneath the bombast and heavy-handed symbolism lies an inquiry into what it means to inhabit a world of unravelling assumptions. Rosalía's Lux is not just a set of songs, but a complex exploration of the human experience in a world that feels increasingly divided.
The album opens with a desire to live between two worlds, loving both God and the Earth's hedonic pleasures. This is far from an accident. Rosalía's intellectualism carries through to every aspect of Lux, from her scholarly research before songwriting to her careful collaboration on production credits and liner notes. The result is an album that doubles as an archive of female mystics, each song drawing on figures such as Saint Teresa of Ávila, Rabia al-Adawiyya, Sun Bu'er or Hildegard von Bingen – women for whom devotion, authority, eroticism and transcendence were never neatly separable.
Lux is exhilarating in its refusal to settle. Reliquia twists spritely strings and vocal snippets into unrecognisable shapes before bursting into ecstatic rhythms. When Rosalía sings "No soy una santa, pero estoy blessed," the line lands with the deliberate thud of heretical subversion: divinisation without ascent.
At its most compelling, Lux projects its dense religious themes onto a maximalist sonic palette, where the sacred is not opposed to the profane, but crowded with it. In Divinize, Rosalía finds liberation not through escape from the body but through deeper entanglement within it. On Porcelana, fragility, fear and ferocity drive a constantly evolving tension.
These are the moments when Lux comes into focus, when easy dualities are gradually unpacked to reveal a multitude: not two opposed forces at opposite ends of a spectrum, but countless cohabiting ones in constant tension. The album's refusal to settle is both its strength and weakness. While it gestures toward something more demanding than simple resolution, its avoidance of politics can feel less principled than insulated.
Still, Lux is a work of immense power and beauty. It is an alchemy that transforms the sacred into something tangible and human. The song La Yugular swells until it abolishes heaven and hell alike, revealing the self as a site of both immensity and compression, where the strain of containing multitudes within a single body carries its own spiritual charge.
Ultimately, Lux is an album about embracing complexity and uncertainty, rather than trying to impose resolution or answers. It is a sonic exploration of the world's crisis, but also a celebration of life's messy beauty and fragility. In this sense, it is both Rosalía's most personal work and her most ambitious – a testament to her boundless creativity and intellectual curiosity.
The album's lavish promotional campaign may have done too much work on my nerves, but once I spent time with Lux, the PR fog began to clear. Beneath the bombast and heavy-handed symbolism lies an inquiry into what it means to inhabit a world of unravelling assumptions. Rosalía's Lux is not just a set of songs, but a complex exploration of the human experience in a world that feels increasingly divided.
The album opens with a desire to live between two worlds, loving both God and the Earth's hedonic pleasures. This is far from an accident. Rosalía's intellectualism carries through to every aspect of Lux, from her scholarly research before songwriting to her careful collaboration on production credits and liner notes. The result is an album that doubles as an archive of female mystics, each song drawing on figures such as Saint Teresa of Ávila, Rabia al-Adawiyya, Sun Bu'er or Hildegard von Bingen – women for whom devotion, authority, eroticism and transcendence were never neatly separable.
Lux is exhilarating in its refusal to settle. Reliquia twists spritely strings and vocal snippets into unrecognisable shapes before bursting into ecstatic rhythms. When Rosalía sings "No soy una santa, pero estoy blessed," the line lands with the deliberate thud of heretical subversion: divinisation without ascent.
At its most compelling, Lux projects its dense religious themes onto a maximalist sonic palette, where the sacred is not opposed to the profane, but crowded with it. In Divinize, Rosalía finds liberation not through escape from the body but through deeper entanglement within it. On Porcelana, fragility, fear and ferocity drive a constantly evolving tension.
These are the moments when Lux comes into focus, when easy dualities are gradually unpacked to reveal a multitude: not two opposed forces at opposite ends of a spectrum, but countless cohabiting ones in constant tension. The album's refusal to settle is both its strength and weakness. While it gestures toward something more demanding than simple resolution, its avoidance of politics can feel less principled than insulated.
Still, Lux is a work of immense power and beauty. It is an alchemy that transforms the sacred into something tangible and human. The song La Yugular swells until it abolishes heaven and hell alike, revealing the self as a site of both immensity and compression, where the strain of containing multitudes within a single body carries its own spiritual charge.
Ultimately, Lux is an album about embracing complexity and uncertainty, rather than trying to impose resolution or answers. It is a sonic exploration of the world's crisis, but also a celebration of life's messy beauty and fragility. In this sense, it is both Rosalía's most personal work and her most ambitious – a testament to her boundless creativity and intellectual curiosity.