Spanish Pop Prodigy Rosalía Sings in 13 Languages on ‘LUX’—Including Hebrew
“One door isn’t enough,” a voice says at the end of “La Yugular,” a showstopping song on Spanish pop singer Rosalía’s new album, LUX. “A million doors aren’t enough.” That might be a good thesis statement to understand Rosalía’s work. As a student at the Catalonia College of Music, her baccalaureate project was the breakthrough El Mal Querer (2018), nominated for several Latin Grammys for its reshaping of contemporary Spanish music. Her punchy, industrial follow-up, 2022’s MOTOMAMI, was concept as well as vision—a gum-chewing girl who mixed experimental reggaeton with discombobulating balladry.
With a previous discography that spanned contemporary folk, flamenco pop, reggaeton, art pop and neoperreo, it was anyone’s guess what Rosalía would do next. But she trades in MOTOMAMI’s gritty eccentricity for a religious lightness on LUX, an often astonishing collection of lives of female saints, set to orchestral, classical and dark electronic elements. It’s Rosalía’s attempt to connect to something greater—no wonder it took so many languages to get there.
In interviews, she stresses that if she weren’t a singer, she’d be studying theology all day. To research the record, she began reading global hagiographies, putting a map in her room and learning where saints came from and the languages they spoke. “I think it’s important to, while collecting stories about the other, mak[e] songs inspired by that,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe. “I’m celebrating and giving love to the other, to the otherness. Trying to understand the otherness better. It feels like nowadays everything is so divided. No! I want the opposite. I need the opposite.”
In addition to singing in her native Spanish, she learned 12 other languages for the project, each corresponding to the life of a different female saint. Whether it’s proving her passion’s violence in Arabic (“For you I would destroy the heavens, for you I would demolish hell”), indulging in a sweeping Italian ballad (“Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti”), claiming a throne in Japanese (“I’m the queen of chaos because God decided so”), or imbuing her own body with holiness in English (“Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary”) her erratic global ambitions make LUX an ambitious and overwhelming project, one requiring steady focus and an open mind. Her airy singing mixed with crushing electronics, for instance on “Berghain” or “Porcelana,” make for a jarring, chaotic and deeply entertaining experience.
But “Novia Robot” in particular caught my attention—it’s not every day a pop singer is releasing a song partially in Hebrew (but you could also say that for any of the other languages on this record). Only on the physical edition of LUX at the moment, the song is a satirical take on female sexuality and exploitation, including a jab at a tradwife TikTok influencer named RoRo. “A world of female robotic fantasy, made for the pleasure of the opposite sex,” she introduces the song over a sticky R&B beat, “Our policy is always to do right by you and make you happy. Whatever the cost!” Owing to the religious bent of the record, she admits she doesn’t dress up for any man, but rather, “I get pretty for God.” Sometimes an audience of one is all you need.
The Hebrew portion comes at the end, when she breaks out of the role of “Robot Girlfriend” and into her power. Rosalía has testified to self-transformation before, notably on MOTOMAMI’s “SAOKO,” but here, she sings, “I was born to rebel / And I rebel to be born again.” It’s a powerful statement to express in Hebrew (“noldati kadi lemarod. vani mord kadi lehivald mechadsh”), the saint she takes inspiration from ostensibly being Mary, mother of Jesus. She ends the song by singing, “If pressure makes diamonds / Then why aren’t we all shining?”—a line that testifies to the complexities of hardship. Singing these lines in Hebrew, too, could gesture to a particularly Jewish regrouping and recycling of trauma and hardship. Hearing a chic, elegant Spanish pop artist sing in a 3,000-year-old language—instead of hearing it from rabbis or clumsy teens on the bima—is, like the album itself, arresting, turning something old and bringing it into the present, a study rich in history.
Rosalía has always mixed the dizzying with the divine, and her methodology on LUX follows the same pattern. Grounding lightness with an unpredictable experimentation and commitment to spectacle, her fusion of language and culture is more artistic statement than anything else. It makes good on its promise as one of the most anticipated albums of the year. Driven by her arresting voice, which is guided to greatness by the London Symphony Orchestra’s dazzling strings, she sings of God, romance, religion and emotional precarity, tearing through the conventions of typical pop and building something blazingly original.