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On the subway in Brooklyn the other day, I spotted yet another Gen Z person dressed in the predominant queer-chic style: a brown mesh top and baggy pants, with a tuft of tight and shiny curls, and a handbag lolling from their wrist. What caught my eye was their bag charm—a picture of Pope Francis.
Christianity is hot again, pundits have repeatedly declared throughout the 21st century, whether during the purity-ringed Bush years or Kanye West’s gospel reboot in the late 2010s. But signs of a true revival have been piling up lately. After years of decline, church attendance has leveled and might even be climbing. TikTok brims with “Christiancore” aesthetics and tradwives. An administration whose Millennial vice president converted to Catholicism just six years ago is pushing explicitly theological policy crusades. And the musical middle has gone megachurchy, filling the Billboard Hot 100 with country-tinged redemption tales and actual worship songs.
Now, Rosalía’s awe-inspiring new album harkens back to an older tradition of Christian art: the symphony written for the glory of God. Known for fusing traditional flamenco with experimental pop, the 33-year-old Catalan superstar has, for a while now, been the model of internet-enabled, cosmopolitan cool. Her smash 2022 album, Motomami, was a feast of earthly delights—reggaeton, hip-hop, hyperpop. But her fourth album, Lux, adopts the sound and ambitions of a classical oratorio to mirror the modern quest for salvation, in all its thrilling and frustrating contours.
Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and arranged with conservatory luminaries such as Caroline Shaw, Lux builds from strings, vocal choirs, and enough timpani to simulate a fracking expedition. Throughout, Rosalía continues her own tradition of pairing handclaps and melisma with bleeps and bangs. Employing 13 languages—including Catalan, Mandarin, and Ukrainian—she reinterprets historical tales of holy women, including Hildegard of Bingen, the monastic musical innovator of the 1110s, and Sun Bu’er, the Taoist poet who scarred her own face for her faith.
The undertaking, Rosalía has said, is meant to challenge dopamine-depleted listeners craving easy kicks. The truth, however, is that Lux might be her most broadly appealing effort yet. Though she’s often tagged as avant garde, Rosalía really is a mainstream fusionist, following the model of Beyoncé, West (now called Ye), and Frank Ocean. And classical music—especially as interpreted here—is hardly outré. She’s drawing from a canon more popular than pop music, the elemental material from which wedding processions and video-game scores are made. Even when Lux dips into regional styles such as fado or whips up computer-generated chaos, the album’s dynamic maneuvers—its crescendos, its denouements, its harmonic choices—skew familiar.
But the singing—Dios mío and holy shnikes, the singing. Flamenco has the unique ability to create operatic feelings on an intimate scale, and Rosalía has only further honed her instrument—plush and warm, with parchment edges—as she’s conquered arenas and headphones. She uses her voice as both emotional artillery and a conversational character, maintaining ferocity and nuance either way. On the slowly unfolding showstoppers, such as “Magnolias,” her refrains climb both up and out, as if she’s ascending to the heavens while giving a political speech. Catchier, more upbeat cuts like “Reliquia” bring her close to the mic, delivering each word with attitude, calling to mind a kid gossiping in the confessional.
[Read: The army of God comes out of the shadows]
Given the linguistic polyphony, even Spanish speakers will need to consult translations to understand her litanies. The gist is that she’s fretting about the heaven-versus-Earth dilemma, torn between “sparkles, doves, and saints” and “sex, violence, and tires” (she’s a certified jalopnik). Though the songs allegedly channel bygone saints, some of whom died for righteousness, she’s mostly telling contemporary tales of sacrifice, replete with references to bad boyfriends and AI girlfriends. Rosalía, like many of us, is asking herself what she’d be willing to give up to save her soul and thereby, in some small way, the world. Her autonomy? Her convenience? Her Jimmy Choos?
She’s probably not ready to do any of that, and the album ends with a compromise: “When God descends / I ascend / we’ll meet halfway.” The music, perhaps accordingly, sometimes languishes in a middle zone of wistful genre exercises. The pizzicato trembling of “Divinize” never quite shakes the feeling of indie twee; “La Yugular” plods a bit too long before locking into a fantastic, processional outro.
But the highs and lows, the moments when she considers going all the way into sin or salvation, explode out of the speakers and grip the gut. The lead single, “Berghain,” opens with violins whirling at helicopter speed while Rosalía plays a Wagnerian diva, sad and stuck. The storm slows and Björk—that goddess of truly confrontational pop—emerges to huff, offbeat, “This is divine intervention.” It’s the most terrifying moment on the album, and an example of the yet-more-daring Lux that Rosalía might have made.
Had she done that, though, she’d have risked leaving behind her congregants: an interconnected global generation looking for a meaning in the mess it’s inherited. In a cultural milieu in which cool now amounts to assembling the most cunning collage of references, Rosalía has given her stylish postmodernism a powerful bass note of purpose. The question of what we believe about our souls and what that belief demands is more serious than lifestyle fads or partisan politics allow for. Embracing the search, Rosalía preaches, can be as significant as having an answer.
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