Rosalía Expands Her Vision on Lux: Multilingual Experimentation, Classical Influences, and Personal Reckonings
With the arrival of Lux, Rosalía delivers the most expansive and formally daring album of her career. Announced last month as an exploration of “feminine mystique, transformation, and transcendence,” the record fulfills that brief through a combination of classical composition, experimental production, and unusually direct songwriting. Early critical response has been emphatic: Rolling Stone called the project “a truly timeless work of art,” arguing that no other contemporary pop artist could have made an album of its scale or intent.
Lux also marks a notable shift in Rosalía’s approach musically, linguistically, and personally. Across its tracks, she confronts grief, ambition, heartbreak, and self-definition, while anchoring the work in rigorous musicianship. Below are the central takeaways from the album.
Talented and educated
Rosalía’s formal conservatory background has informed her work since El Mal Querer, but on Lux it becomes a structural foundation. She studied flamenco vocal performance at Barcelona’s Catalonia College of Music (ESMUC), a program known for its competitive admission process, and the album foregrounds the discipline and precision that training demands.
Her collaborations with the London Symphony Orchestra bring a symphonic dimension to the project, while individual tracks gesture toward canonical repertoire. Ahead of the album’s release, Rosalía was seen studying the score of Puccini’s Tosca, a detail that later proved relevant. She explained to Billboard that “Mio Cristo” was conceived as her version of an aria, merging operatic structure with modern production. The influence of Vivaldi and Mozart surfaces throughout, not as ornamentation but as part of the album’s core vocabulary.
A Multilingual Framework Without AI
One of the album’s defining features is its use of 14 languages. Rosalía, who is fluent in Spanish and Catalan, expanded her repertoire to include English, Italian, French, Japanese, Latin, Ukrainian, Sicilian, Arabic, Mandarin, Hebrew, Portuguese, and others.
Speaking on The New York Times’ Popcast, she described the process as “a lot of trying to understand how other languages work,” emphasizing that each vocal performance required extensive phonetic study. The sessions relied on Google Translate, professional translators, and repeated takes to ensure accuracy.
Crucially, Rosalía clarified that the multilingual concept was achieved without AI, an increasingly rare distinction in contemporary pop production. The album’s fluid transitions from one language to another reflect manual technique rather than digital augmentation, underscoring the labor that went into its construction.
The record also includes some of the most confrontational writing of Rosalía’s career. “La Perla,” a collaboration with música mexicana vocalist Yahritza, levels pointed accusations at a narcissistic ex, described as “a local disappointment,” “a national heartbreaker,” and “an emotional terrorist.”
The orchestral arrangement swells around lyrics detailing financial irresponsibility and betrayal: “He spends money he has and doesn’t have… he doesn’t understand loyalty and faithfulness.” While fans have speculated that the song references her former fiancé Rauw Alejandro, Rosalía does not name him. The power of the track lies less in speculation than in the precision and control of her delivery.
Rosalía publicly confirmed her engagement to Alejandro in 2023 through the video for their track “Beso,” later sharing details of the proposal in a GQ interview. Months after, the pair separated, ending plans for a wedding she had already begun to imagine.
One album track, “Focu ’Ranni,” included on physical editions, addresses the emotional fallout of that cancellation. The lyrics describe the symbolic rituals that will now never occur: “No one will throw rice up at the sky, no one will bring flowers or get drunk, there’ll be no one to bless a love he’ll never truly know.”
She also references a tattoo of his name: “I etched your name on my ribs but my heart never had your initials,” reframing the relationship as something she now sees with clarity and distance. The refrain concludes with a declaration of autonomy: “I’ll just belong to me and to my liberty.”
Across Lux, Rosalía presents an album that is less concerned with genre boundaries than with constructing a full expressive world. The record synthesizes classical lineage, global language traditions, and autobiographical material into a project that feels simultaneously intimate and architectural.
More than a stylistic exercise, the album reads as a consolidation of her artistic identity, an assertion of control, skill, and perspective after years of public scrutiny and personal shift. In doing so, Rosalía delivers a work that expands her role within global pop while reaffirming her commitment to rigor and experimentation.
