Known for her unusual yet distinctive, memorable, and almost intriguing musical style, Rosalía has been tearing up Spanish, European, and global charts with record-breaking numbers, reaching over 1,000 million streams at her peak over the last five years. Her song ‘Despechá’ hit 1,236 million streams on Spotify in 2022, while her “lowest” popular track, ‘TKN’ (feat. Travis Scott), still climbed to 495 million in 2020.
This year, beginning in early November, she delighted the audience with her fresh album LUX, which includes 15 digital tracks and 18 on the CD and vinyl editions. The Rosalía’s LUX album advert campaign was loud, sharp, and straight to the point.
Album cover in Times Square, orchestras on Madrid’s billboards, and songs in 13 languages, it blew up the internet and won new fans worldwide in just hours. The hype for the upcoming album went through the roof. Social media was buzzing, dropping the playful hint: “Album of the Year?” Considering all this excitement, it’s clear this release is something you definitely don’t want to miss.
Here, at Honey POP, we picked five non-cliché reasons proving why LUX truly belongs on your Spotify list.
Catalonian DNA Fuses With Eclectic Rave
Born near Barcelona, in Spain’s Catalonia region with its own Catalan language and free-spirited identity, Rosalía grew up surrounded by flamenco rhythms from childhood. Blending those traditional melodies with Latin touches like reggaeton, she shaped a recognisable sound and performance style that feels entirely her own.
In LUX, Rosalía virtuously places the orchestra at the core of most tracks, adding to each a different mix of pop, rave, and electronic notes, together with striking, loud cues and screams that cut through the sounds of violin and organ.
The paradox of LUX’s success lies in its screaming infusion of spiritual music and Spanish baroque archaism. The sound itself becomes both the artwork and the instrument to convey the stories, carrying the ideas even without words.
Unbeatable & Unexpected Collabs
Yves Tumor, Björk, and even the child choir Escolanía de Montserrat are not the whole list of collaborations LUX offers to the discerning listener.
Notably, while separate artists like Björk, the Spanish artists Estrella Morente and Sílvia Pérez Cruz performing each in one song, the Escolanía de Montserrat accompanied a full seven tracks, including ‘Magnolias’ and ‘Reliquia‘, highlighting the divine sense of the last tracks and the whole album’s core, referring to the divine topic as the roots of the world’s birth and natural processes like love, soul tortures and the rebirth theme.
The most explosive track, ‘Berghain‘, drew the most attention out of all the others.
The London orchestra, operatic singing, Björk’s deep, enchanting voice, the use of German, Spanish and English, the visual interplay of violence and love combining into a single whole, highlighted by Mike Tyson’s violent quote, “I’ll f*** you ’til you love me” allures strongly, almost forcing the space around the listener to convey the emotional background of the track itself. In the context of LUX, collaboration is not only about performers.
It masterfully weaves contemporary musical techniques with timeless classical traditions, where the divine choir gives way to words of cruelty and violence that coexist with love and tenderness, equally forming an inseparable part of the human life cycle.
Rebirth Of History And Spirituality
The Palau de la Música Chamber Choir, the London Orchestra, Escolanía de Montserrat, and the sounds of the organ are not simply Rosalía’s whims or carefully staged hype to promote LUX.
Like the album itself, the presence of these different choirs, alongside operatic and baroque elements, points to the central idea of LUX — the question of divinity, where religion is reimagined as much as the human role within it. The Escolanía de Montserrat, a boy’s Catalonian choir, flows with precision and innocence, later replaced in some passages by the adult Palau de la Música Chamber Choir and the London Orchestra.
This progression embodies the musical art of LUX, illustrating the natural life cycle: as youth move into adulthood, they remain angelic and almost pure. In ‘Berghain‘, the London Orchestra plays brisk, ascending motifs that capture the essence of the song — love and hatred intertwined as part of the adult world.
By contrast, in ‘Magnolias’ and ‘Reliquia,’ the parts performed by Escolanía de Montserrat convey tender self-love, untouched by violence or suffering. Here, the children’s choir remains present on the spot, highlighting innocence, purity, and the gentle side of human experience.
Femininity In Its Strength
In her interview on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, Rosalía mentioned the powerful women in history who inspired her while creating LUX. Among them were Joan of Arc, Saint Olga of Kyiv, Saint Rosalia of Palermo, and Saint Teresa of Ávila.
However, what is particularly noteworthy is that, unlike how they are usually portrayed in history, these figures are, if not for the first time, presented to the audience not as martyrs but as women whose sanity, forged through suffering, is a source of strength rather than weakness.
Their resilience resists passive submission to the inevitable course of events. Fighting against a Catholic Church dominated by men, like Saint Teresa of Ávila. Standing up to her husband’s murderers in the name of justice, like Saint Olga of Kyiv. Striving for a kingdom’s unity only to be betrayed by men, like Joan of Arc.
The strength of these women went far beyond resilience, defying violence and centuries of patriarchal pressure. Nearly 500 years later, LUX pays tribute to their memory, weaving their courage and spirit into its tracks.
A Multilingual Hymn to Global Cultures
LUX is the first album ever with 13 tracks, with a couple of them having three or more languages in one.
Beyond her love for diverse cultures and their histories, Rosalía, fluent in Spanish, Catalan, and Portuguese, revealed that creating a multilingual album reflects her long-standing passion for learning new languages.
This daring blend of languages, from Japanese and Ukrainian to French and more, struck a chord with listeners, propelling the album’s popularity to unprecedented heights, even by Rosalía’s already global-star standards. Let us know what is your favorite track from LUX? Don’t keep it to yourself—tweet us your thoughts at @thehoneypop or on Facebook and Instagram.
TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ROSALIA:
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