Sometimes it seems as if everyone wants to be a pop girlie. Last year, Taylor Swift counted herself among the “tortured poets,” but nowadays she is a self-described “showgirl,” having released a short album full of bite-size songs co-produced by the distinguished hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback. The year’s biggest new musical act is probably Huntr/x, the fictional girl group from the animated Netflix film “KPop Demon Hunters.” When Demi Lovato, the former Disney teen idol, wanted to go back to her roots, she released “Fast,” a perfectly superficial club track; the accompanying album is called, appropriately, “It’s Not That Deep.” Even MGK, the rapper turned rocker, tried to reinvent himself earlier this year with a video called “Cliché,” in which he danced and lip-synched like a boy-bander desperate for one last hit. It was an amusing pivot, although it inspired such intense mockery that MGK felt moved to record an Instagram reel explaining himself. “It’s a pop song, man,” he said.
In this way and in many others, Rosalía is exceptional. She is a trained flamenco singer from Spain who found an international audience in 2018, when she released “El Mal Querer,” an album full of diaphanous flamenco-pop experiments, which also served as her thesis project at the prestigious Catalonia College of Music. Rosalía’s sound, full of curlicued vocal melodies and precise hand-clap rhythms, didn’t resemble anything else in the pop universe, but Rosalía herself was obviously a star, and she followed the album with a series of high-profile collaborations, including reggaetón hits with J Balvin (“Con Altura”) and Bad Bunny (“LA NOCHE DE ANOCHE”). With her fierce, beat-driven album “MOTOMAMI” (2022), she took her place among the Spanish-language artists who have lately transformed popular music. But these days she has something different in mind. When she announced that the first single from her new album was going to be called “Berghain,” some fans expected dance music—Berghain is the name of the world’s most famous techno club, in Berlin. What they got, instead, was essentially a three-minute opera, complete with an orchestral overture and a guest appearance by the avant-garde singer and composer Björk, who arrives as a deus ex machina, howling, “This is divine intervention.” The accompanying album, “Lux,” turns out to be a sharp swerve away from the logic of the pop economy, in which songs compete to provide the most pleasure to the most people. “Lux” sounds less like a streaming playlist and more like a cult film, or perhaps an art installation: there are fifteen songs (eighteen on the vinyl and CD versions), divided into four movements, with lyrics in thirteen different languages, and Rosalía’s most constant companion is not the beat of reggaetón but rather the swooping and swelling of the London Symphony Orchestra. Having conquered the pop world with ease, Rosalía is now embracing difficulty.
A certain recalcitrance has always been part of what makes Rosalía so compelling. As a teen-ager, she appeared on “Tú Sí Que Vales,” a talent-competition show on Spanish television; when one judge wasn’t impressed, she said, in Spanish, “I didn’t come here to accept criticism,” and the audience whooped in encouragement. Early in her career, she was sometimes celebrated for fleeing the strictures of flamenco music in order to find freedom on the dance floor, and on the charts. But dance floors and charts have their own rules, and one of the functions of an album as intense and expansive as “Lux” is to remind pop listeners of all the limits that they typically take for granted. The album has a notably wide dynamic range, which means that listeners who lean in during the quiet passages may find themselves blasted backward by the thunderous climaxes. In “De Madrugá,” she sings a few lines in Ukrainian to evoke the fervor of Olga of Kiev, the tenth-century ruler who massacred the tribe responsible for killing her husband. And for “Mio Cristo” she basically wrote herself an Italian aria and then learned to sing it, building to a glorious high B-flat that she hits and holds; we hear a quick snippet of Rosalía’s studio banter (“That’s going to be the energy, and then—”) before the orchestra cuts her off with the reverberant final note. Pop stars often talk about working hard, but Rosalía makes most of her peers seem lazy, and, indeed, any listener not inclined to embark upon a multilingual research project may end up feeling a bit lazy, too. Rosalía’s representatives asked journalists to listen to this album in the dark, while reading the lyrics on a screen—logically impossible, for most of us, but doubtless Rosalía herself could find a way.
There is a story to “Lux,” or maybe there are a few different stories. The lyrics hint at love, betrayal (one song includes the phrase “un terrorista emocional”), revenge, and acceptance. The combined effect can be exhausting, in ways Rosalía’s previous albums never were: the twists and turns of “La Yugular,” a theological exploration inspired by Islam, are easier to admire than to enjoy—at least until the finale, a pleasingly earthy clip from an old Patti Smith interview. Sometimes the lightest moments are the most affecting, such as when, in “Reliquia,” Rosalía floats into her upper register, delivering a sumptuous and faintly sacrilegious expression of love and loss. “I’ll be your relic / I am your relic,” she sings, in Spanish, and for a moment it all seems simple.
Like virtually all musicians, Rosalía seems to have mixed feelings about how separate she wants to be, really, from the pop marketplace. “I need to think that what I’m doing is pop, because otherwise I don’t think, then, that I am succeeding,” she told the New York Times, in a recent interview. “What I want is to do music that, hopefully, a lot of people can enjoy.” But of course that’s not all she wants. The single most surprising contributor to “Lux” is Mike Tyson, who during a chaotic 2002 press conference told a journalist, “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.” This phrase, without the incendiary final word, interrupts the otherwise elegant coda of “Berghain,” shouted a few times by the electronic producer Yves Tumor. The interruption is a shock—startling enough, perhaps, to dissuade some listeners from adding the song to their favorite streaming playlists, lest it ruin the mood. Maybe that’s the idea. Music-streaming services encourage us to mix and match, so perhaps they also encourage us to spend more time listening to songs that fit pleasantly alongside other songs. A small but significant number of musicians have begun to withhold their music from these outlets, some for economic reasons (the sites don’t pay much), some for political reasons (Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is also the chairman of a military-technology company), and some for no stated reason at all. The new Rosalía album is available everywhere, but it echoes this desire to withdraw from a big, messy system, in the hope of encouraging listeners to engage in a more intentional, single-minded way; it’s an album that’s not designed to be ubiquitous, or to slip smoothly into our lives and playlists. “Lux” wants to make us stop whatever we’re doing and listen, which inevitably means that it’s less broadly appealing—less listenable, in a sense—than albums that ask less. It’s also much harder to forget. ♦
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