Popular music in Spanish is having a moment. In February, Bad Bunny plays the Super Bowl halftime show, and the Puerto Rican superstar has sold out a record-breaking ten nights at the Atlético Madrid Stadium. In end-of-year best album lists, he has been battling it out with the Catalan-born Rosalía. Her latest release, Lux, was declared ‘album of the year’ (2025) by The Guardian, the BBC and Business Insider. Andrew Lloyd Webber went a step further and called it the ‘album of the decade’. Appearing on La Revuelta (Rosalía almost doubled the Spanish primetime chat show’s average audience and screenshare), the 33-year-old reported she would soon be packing her bags to appear on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon. She also announced that her grandmother had been spreading the gospel of her international fame, drawing on a higher authority: the local Bishop had written to his congregation to praise Rosalía for being an exemplary ambassador for her hometown, Sant Esteve Sesrovires. Spanish Prime Minister, Pedro Sánchez, tweeted congratulations when Lux broke records for a female Spanish artist by accumulating 42.1 million streams on Spotify in the 24 hours after its release on 7 November. A number one hit in Spain, the album entered at number 4 on the UK and Billboard charts. Demand for vinyl copies was particularly strong.

If Bad Bunny has made a point of singing exclusively in Puerto Rican Spanish, Rosalía challenges the global hegemony of the English language in another way. Lux, which means light in Latin – and has religious connotations, given references to ‘Lux Aeterna’ in Catholic liturgy – has lyrics sung in Arabic, English, Castilian Spanish, Catalan, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian and Ukrainian. Given the historic monolingualism of the Anglophone-dominated music industry – even in Miami, the Colombian Shakira kept her Spanish-language repertoire to a minimum on her current tour – singing in 14 languages is a risky artistic strategy, but possibly no more commercially daring than not singing primarily in English. This was the prerequisite for Shakira – and Gloria Estefan and Julio Iglesias before her – entering the premier league of global pop stardom.

Rosalía is bilingual in Spanish and Catalan, and fluent in English. As well as using Duolingo to hone polyglot intonation, she sought advice from speakers of different languages, such as the French actress and singer, Charlotte Gainsbourg, who – alongside the Gallic electronic duo Justice – provided her with input on the two French-language songs, ‘Jeanne’ and ‘Sauvignon Blanc’.

In a cultural landscape that celebrates Lady Gaga’s ongoing Mayhem Ball Tour for pushing the boundaries of genre (it features an overture from Bizet’s Carmen and a journeyman live band exaggerating their gestures and playing in a manner akin to orchestras at musicals), it is difficult to dispute Rolling Stone magazine’s decision to crown Rosalía as ‘pop’s most provocative chaos agent’. Classically trained, she has long been precociously erudite – her breakthrough second album, El mal querer, drew on the 13th-century Romance of Flamenca, the subject of her final degree project – but Lux ups the ante.

Comprised of between 14 and 18 tracks (depending on the format), Rosalía’s latest album eschews the pop default of fade-in-fade-out between songs. The music is instead divided into four movements. A revolving cast of female saints and holy thinkers are referenced in the languages in which they wrote. Canonical figures from the Spanish-language tradition – Carmelite Nun, Saint Teresa of Avila (1515-1582), or the first Saint of the New World, Rosa of Lima (1586-1617) – are joined among others by the Jewish prophet and older sister of Moses, Miriam; Vimala, a figure from ancient India who worked as a prostitute before becoming a pioneering Buddhist nun and poet; Sufi mystic Rabia Basri (c. 716-801); Olga of Kiev (c. 890-925-969), a convert to Christianity who avenged her husband’s murder with a killing spree before becoming a saint; the German Abbess and polymath, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179); and, fittingly, Saint Rosalía (1130-1166), popularly known as la Santuzza (or ‘the little Saint’), who called off her wedding the day before departing to live as a hermit in a cave on Mount Pellegrino.

Even the most erudite of listeners will struggle to identify all of the cultural, linguistic and musical reverberations; those who invest in the gatefold vinyl have a head start with more information provided on Rosalía’s influences, inspirations and collaborators. Chief among the latter are the London Symphony Orchestra, with Icelandic composer and conductor Daniel Bjarnason at the helm; and Reykjavik-born electro-pop pioneer Björk, with whom Rosalía collaborated on the standalone 2023 charity (against open-net fishing) single ‘Oral’.

A maximalist opus, Lux renders 1970s prog rock concept albums understated by comparison. In a manner reminiscent of Kate Bush, who employed a feminine sensibility and classical training to imbue prog with a newfound sensuality and sexuality, Rosalía draws on the biographies and writings of female authors to reveal eroticism and spirituality as habitual bed fellows. The most cursory read of the Biblical Song of Solomon – described by novelist A.S. Byatt as a ‘rich, fleshy metaphor for theology and the poetry of a religion centred on the historical incarnation of the eternal and spiritual’ – or Early Modern Spanish mystics renders obvious that this is hardly a recent phenomenon. As the tagline to a popular Spanish podcast, Philip’s Daughters, hosted by two young women with PhDs in baroque literature, goes: ‘Whatever is happening to you already happened to someone in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Welcome to the therapeutic corner of deliberate ahistoricism: nuns, petite lives, baroque dissections, Carmelite enthusiasm, trans-epochal stardom, nefarious sins and much more’.

Rosalía, who reputedly did the Santiago pilgrimage alone aged 19, entered an extended period of soul-searching three years ago when her fiancée, Puerto Rican reggaeton star Rauw Alejandro, broke off the engagement. An ascetic labour of love carried far away from her family (still based in Catalonia), Lux took two years to make largely in Los Angeles. The star sought solace and inspiration in the philosophies of Ursula K. Le Guin, Chris Kraus and Simone Weil as well as channelling the energy of a self-curated personal roll-call of role models: Joan of Arc, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Cher and Patti Smith (sampled on ‘La Yagular’ giving a 1976 interview in which Smith riffs on the theme of a classic song by The Doors, ‘Break on Through’, fusing Biblical exegesis, Blakean poetics and the experience of visiting Jim Morrison’s grave in Paris).

Not since Madonna’s first post-divorce album, Like a Prayer (1989), has an iconoclastic marketing campaign chimed so well with the cultural zeitgeist. La Ciccone, who once tried without success to book Rosalía to play her birthday, has praised Lux – which includes a song about God being a stalker – as the work of a genuine visionary.

On 7 November, the day Lux was released, Rosalía opened the Top 40 Music Awards Show, also featuring Ed Sheeran and Colombian stadium headliner Karol G, in Valencia with a performance amidst neon crosses of ‘Reliquia’, a short song whose varied musical canvas, from sweeping symphonies to dissonant electronica, showcase a remarkable vocal prowess and versatility. The front cover of the Sunday supplement to El País, Spain’s newspaper of record had an eroticised photograph of the singer in a designer nun’s habit beneath the headline ‘Saint Rosalía’. The star later had a blonde halo died into her hair to appear on talk shows and social media.

Whilst Pope John II encouraged Italians to boycott Madonna after she premiered the video for ‘Like a Prayer’ during a Pepsi commercial, the power dynamics between ecclesiastical authorities, global capital and secular society have changed beyond recognition. Begun as family-run business in Avila in 1860, Santa Teresa gourmet foods is now a global concern. The company launched a limited-edition pre-Christmas Santa Teresa Sauvignon Blanc egg-yolk in a custom-made Lux cardboard box (a somewhat classier proposition than the limited edition Rosalía Coca-Cola can).

If The Times of London reported on Rosalía riding a wave of so-called Nun-mania, she is also in sync with the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year, ‘parasocial’, which is defined as a relationship felt by someone between themselves and a famous person they do not know. Rosalía’s candid responses, humour and charmingly flawed, but perfectly comprehensible, English turned her 2022 appearance on Amelia Dimoldenberg’s UK-based YouTube programme, ‘Chicken Shop Date’ into a viral sensation. More problematically, critics of the star – such as the gypsy poet and activist Noelia Córtes – have faced a backlash from Rosalía’s militant fan army when calling her out for cultural appropriation. The idol going unusually quiet in 2024 and much of 2025 built a sense of expectation amongst the faithful.

The score to lead single ‘Berghain’ (the name of a legendary Berlin techno club with an exclusive door policy) appeared on the singer’s Instagram page with a link to Substack on 13 October. In Madrid’s Callao Square, a countdown followed by fans in person and on social media coincided with Rosalía driving to the central location with friends – streamed live on TikTok – and collapsing the traffic in the Spanish capital (the City Mayor threatened her with a 600,000 Euros fine but later backtracked) to make public the upcoming apparition of Lux on 7 November. Twenty pre-release listening parties were organised around the world with Rosalía attending those held in Barcelona, New York and Mexico City. After the latter, she shared her adventures around the city with Monterrey-born pop, r’n’b and trap band Latin Mafia on social media.

Before making her way to La Revuelta studios in central Madrid by foot, Rosalía was filmed in a staged celebrity residents’ association meeting whose quorum included Oscar-winning filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar, Spanish international footballer Alexia Putellas and Madrid’s former Mayor (2015-2019), the left-wing activist and lawyer Manuela Carmena, who joked about how no fine would have been issued against the star on her watch. In an hour-long interview with David Broncano, Rosalía chatted amicably with wit, humour and intelligence about everything from work-induced celibacy to her covering so many musical bases but, much to her host’s surprise, having never heard of Paul Simon’s Graceland album (1986). She then performed a capella version of ‘La Perla’, a song also performed on Jimmy Fallon whose references to a ‘terrorista emocional’ (‘emotional terrorist’) have been widely assumed to be a character assassination of ex-fiancé, Rauw Alejandro.

Rosalía never tires of describing Lux as an anti-dopamine hit, requiring sustained concentration, but the album is more playful than summaries of its ascetic aesthetic might suggest, and it has been curated and promoted with all attention spans in mind. The video-clip for ‘Berghain’, directed by Nicolás Méndez, who worked with the star on the video for the 2018 smash ‘Malamente’, packs much (arguably too much) into three and half-minutes, serving as a promotional trailer for the album’s virtuosity and range complete with arresting images and segments tailer-made for TikTok. The first half depicts a physically and emotionally distressed Rosalía sufficiently distracted to be unaware of the London Symphony Orchestra following her around, at home, in a medical surgery, walking and on public transport; the second echoes a gothic fairytale, a deer sharing the frame with the singer, and vocals from Björk and American experimentalist and producer Yves Tumor reproducing a line – ‘I’ll f*** you till you love me’ – infamously coined in 2002 by heavyweight boxer Mike Tyson during a violent pre-fight press conference with Lennox Lewis in New York.

On the one hand, the most obvious precedent for Lux is Björk’s classical-inspired and experimental Vespertine (2001), an album complemented by a live DVD from the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden. Conversely, the fan favourite marked an active retreat from the mainstream, while Lux has elevated Rosalía to the next level of success: in 2026 she will make her debut in HBO psychological teen drama Euphoria and embark on her biggest global arena tour yet (tickets for most territories sold out in a heartbeat). Given the bold decision to relinquish on-stage musicians for the 2002 Motomami world tour – whose minimalist focus was on the pre-production and manipulation of electronic sounds combined with on-stage cameraman who stalked the star throughout the show – all bets are off on how the more classically inflected Lux will translate to the stage on opening night in Lyon on 16 March. Up to now, I have always been more impressed by recordings of individual songs at award shows than I was by the two concerts I attended on her last two world tours, which, to my mind, lacked spontaneity and the emotional frisson and fragility of the best flamenco.

While the Spanish genre par excellence takes a backseat on Lux, ‘La rumba del perdón’ – featuring Silvia Peréz Cruz (a graduate, like Rosalía, of the Catalan College of Music) and Estrella Morente (daughter of the legendary Enrique Morente) – incorporates elements of Portuguese fado, flamenco and Mexican drug trafficking ballads. Studio wizardry disguises limitations in Estrella Morente’s vocal prowess, evident when I saw her perform as part of an opera-style bullfight featuring her husband, matador Javier Conde, in Malaga in 2017, or as an unusual support act for rock star Lenny Kravitz on his 2024 tour of Spain. Against the backdrop of so many world-class flamenco stars struggling to make a living, and charges against Rosalía for exploiting gypsy traditions for commercial gain, it is perhaps a wasted opportunity that she called on the services of well-established celebrity performer clearly long past her prime.

Without entering into debates as to whether Rosalía is guilty or not of cultural appropriation in relation to minority (sub)cultures such as flamenco or Puerto Rican reggaeton, it is important to recognise that the prestige and institutional backing behind much classical music results in a markedly different dynamic. Catalan-independence lobbyists voiced disapproval over the exclusive Escolania boys’ choir – based at the Montserrat Abbey – being enlisted to sing in Castilian Spanish. The fact the choir has in the past sung in Latin, English and German without comment suggests the criticism was of this icon of Catalan national identity performing in Spanish as opposed to multilingualism per se. TikTok classical music influencer Dinah Challah has called Lux ‘probably the most important thing that’s happened in classical music this year’. Rosalía’s profile is such that her, for example, adding a recording by Ermonela Jaho to her playlist made a difference to the Albanian soprano’s profile. Promiscuous as Lux is in its genre-hopping, the introduction of classical elements has dominated critical appraisals of the album and its merits or lack thereof.

The opening of ‘Porcelana’ (a song also including rap in Latin and Japanese) has been compared to Beethoven’s late spring quartets, and minor-key chords described as reminiscent of Mozart’s piano concertos. In addition to the London Symphony Orchestra, the Chamber Choir of Palau de la Música Catalana make guest appearances on ten of the album’s songs, recordings carried out at Hamburg’s acoustically blessed Elbphilarmonie Music Hall.

The patronage and participation of such prestige institutions did not prevent classical music critic Hugh Morris from dismissing ‘Berghain’ as ‘new musical kitsch’. While conceding that much of the singing on Lux is remarkable, with production that is subtle and imaginative in equal measure, the Daily Telegraph’s Ivan Hewitt was equally disparaging about its lead single: ‘the hammered repeated motifs from the violins are too fast be played by human figures, and there’s a nasty metallic sheen to the sound. It sounds startlingly vivid, but also anonymous, as if an AI music generating programme has been asked to write an imitation Baroque concerto’. It is not necessary to subscribe to this specific criticism to acknowledge that the elevation of the song to the album’s keynote composition owed more to commercial than artistic considerations, flattening Lux’s virtuoso and very human myriad of influences – classical included – into the sonic equivalent of the sugar rush of a pack of pick ‘n’ mix sweets. Experiencing ‘Berghain’ in context, a third of the way into the album at the beginning of the second movement, results in a radically different listening experience to watching the video in isolation. The preceding track, ‘Mio Cristo Pinage Diamenti’ (Italian for ‘My Christ cries Diamonds’) combines elements of a torch song and an aria (featuring a great falsetto moment) whose lyrics employ the relationship between Saint Francis and Saint Clare of Assisi as the basis for dialogues about platonic love, spiritual connection and the pain that accompanies them.

This provides a suitable melodramatic segue as the sweeping symphony of ‘Berghain’ takes the album to a self-consciously over-the-top crescendo, before establishing a newfound minimalism on ‘La Perla’. The waltz-like song, alongside closing track, ‘Magnolias’ (which imagines the narrator’s own funeral), constitute the album’s most poignant and elegiac showcase for the star’s largely unadorned voice. While not beyond reproach, Lux is a game-changer for Rosalía as well as popular and classical musical genres.