Rosalía’s ‘Lux’ is taking prestige pop to new levels

Let’s try to keep calm, because, for all of its ambition and grandeur, this new Rosalía album, “Lux,” demands a sharpened mind more than a blown one. It’s an opaquely themed, scrupulously produced concept record in which the Spanish pop auteur sings about a handful of saints and martyrs in more than a dozen languages, backed by the unmitigated power of the London Symphony Orchestra — a stacking of lavish gestures that Rosalía hopes might help elongate our diminished online attention spans.

Yet, while these expansive new songs resist being mulched into TikTok fertilizer, they might also be establishing a new set of pleasure principles for the artificial intelligence era. If you’ve already figured out that the promise of AI is nothing more than a corporate attack on human curiosity, contemplation, critical thinking and free will, “Lux” will sound like a new kind of feel-good music. Listen up and try not to get swept away. Focus feels better than awe.

Maybe Rosalía was prepping us for this back in 2022 with “Motomami,” a spirited, detailed album of hybridized flamenco, electro and reggaeton, its references pushing backward and forward in time, broadening our ideas about pop collage timescales. With “Lux,” her priorities do an artful little somersault. If “Motomami” took its playfulness seriously, “Lux” takes its seriousness playfully, with Rosalía consistently singing in kindly timbres that make her language-swapping (Arabic, German, Hebrew, Mandarin, Portuguese, Ukrainian, more) hard to clock. It’s as if she set up a zip line between the Tower of Babel and the Tower of Song — which, for a prestige album about the agony and the ecstasy of faith and devotion, feels weirdly artful, funny and humane.

She’s obviously having massive fun whenever she breaks through the fourth wall — especially during her most opulent flourishes. For the grand finale of “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” her speaking voice fills the ballad’s final pregnant pause. “That’s gonna be the energy,” she says, as if describing the arrangement to a friend before the whole thing was recorded. “And then …” DUMMMM, goes the orchestra’s big finish. She pulls a similar trick during the waltzy “La Perla,” filling a silence after a dramatic cymbal crash with a sympathetic pffft of a giggle. When she isn’t deflating big moments, she’s casually rising to them — as in the climax of “De Madrugá,” a song punctuated with flamenco percussion and ASMR hyperventilation, her calligraphic singing growing inky as it widens into the shape of bravura strokes.

“Lux” is luxe, and sometimes it’s too much. We could compare Rosalía to Lady Gaga or Beyoncé all week long, but her primary influence here is the world of Hollywood sound design — a business rampant with overzealous Foley artists emboldened to make known the sound of movie stars folding their laundry.

Some of these songs can tire the ear in similar ways, overfilling our brains with collisions of hyperreal details and orchestral pomp — like when Rosalía puts the string section into attack mode during “Berghain,” a melodramatic collaboration with Björk and Yves Tumor that evokes either a television commercial for luxury timepieces or a trailer for a film about the kind of people who wear them. Whenever the A24 logo starts floating into your mind’s ear, you’re probably experiencing the bad kind of synesthesia. That said, if such a composite of Hollywoodism, hyperrealism and luxury corniness was, in fact, the point, may St. Andrew Warhola Jr. of Pittsburgh bless that mess.

For the most part, Rosalía keeps this cathedral tidy. Consider it an act of hospitality. She wants our undivided attention for 50 minutes, and she wants to earn every second of it. What she delivers in the end refuses to be degraded into social media morsels, or vague restaurant ambiance, or homework playlist zone-out fodder, and if you try to funnel it through your earbuds at the gym, you might achieve some new state of metaphysical fitness, but no guarantees. The best place to hear “Lux” is inside your mind, where real intelligence still presides.