Loaded Album of the week
By Fred Spanner
ROSALIA: LUX ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Let’s get it straight, right from the start: This isn’t just another pop album. It’s more like a cathedral erected in sonic form, flickering with incense and light, where club beats once hung out. It’s sexy, strange, high-concept, and yes, gloriously over the top, just the way we like it.
We’re talking love and lust, fame and fallouts, divinity and damnation. She’s reading hagiographies of female saints, she’s exploring what it means to give up control, to be object and subject, to blur god, goddess, mortal, pop star.
Right from opener “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas” we’ve got fado handclaps, operatic swellings, club-bass under church-pipes. Then there’s “Berghain” where she teams with the likes of Björk and Yves Tumor. Techno strings crash into fugues, and German choirs chant rage and desire.
Some moments feel like the choir at the opera house just accidentally wandered into the DJ booth at 3 AM and decided to raise the roof.
Rosalía's voice is front and centre, but it’s dressed in armour now. It’s rich, angular, and full of drama. The orchestration never lets her hide. Tracks like “Porcelana” and “Mio Cristo” show her switching registers between vulnerability and diva-mode.
If you’re up for the ride, the reward is massive.
This album could be argued as her masterpiece so far: bold, unsettling, and seductive. It usurps the cheap thrills and light refrains and goes for something bigger.