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How Rosalía Explores Faith and Identity in LUX
Three years after Motomami, Rosalía returns with LUX, her most ambitious and introspective album to date, a work that reimagines the sacred and the human, the divine and the flawed. Nominated for multiple awards and already hailed as a landmark in experimental pop, LUX finds the Spanish artist exploring spirituality not as dogma but as a living, breathing dialogue between light and imperfection.
“If I didn’t have a musical career, I’d probably be at university studying theology,” Rosalía told Zane Lowe in an interview filmed at Madrid’s historic Frontón Beti Jai. Her words summarize the intellectual and emotional pulse behind LUX: a project born from solitude, study, and spiritual hunger. After the minimalist immediacy of Motomami, she envisioned LUX as its opposite: a maximalist symphony where flamenco, opera, and electronica coexist with Gregorian chants and orchestral grandeur.
The album was three years in the making, a period in which Rosalía immersed herself in reading and reflection. She studied religious and philosophical texts by women mystics such as Teresa of Ávila, Simone Weil, and Hildegard of Bingen, seeking to understand how different cultures conceive of holiness. That search becomes the core of LUX, an album that turns theology into sound and personal revelation.
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Rosalía calls the album LUX in reference to Leonard Cohen’s line, “Forget your perfect offering, there is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.” For her, light enters through imperfection. The songs reflect that philosophy: LUX embraces contradictions, allowing sacred imagery and sensual experience to coexist. It is, in her own words, about “the beauty of being human, flawed, and still divine.”
Musically, the album moves through a global, borderless palette. Across 15 tracks in the digital edition (and 18 in the CD and vinyl versions), Rosalía sings in thirteen languages: Spanish, Catalan, English, Latin, Japanese, Italian, German, Ukrainian, Arabic, Sicilian, French, Mandarin, Hebrew, and Portuguese. Her command of sonic diversity mirrors the universality of her themes. She collaborates with Björk, Carminho, Estrella Morente, Silvia Pérez Cruz, Yves Tumor, and others, building bridges between cultures and traditions.
Opening track “Sexo, violencia y llantas” sets the tone with its slow-burning piano that erupts into violent electronic textures, contrasting earthly desire and spiritual longing. “Reliquia” travels through cities and memories with light violin arrangements, while “Porcelana” intertwines Latin and Japanese lyrics to explore the tension between chaos and purity. On “Mio Cristo,” she sings an operatic aria in Italian, describing a Christ who “cries diamonds.”
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LUX also revisits Rosalía’s ongoing dialogue with feminism and autonomy. In “Focu’ranni,” sung in Sicilian and Spanish, she declares her refusal to give up freedom for love: “I won’t be your half, nor your property.” The companion track “Novia robot” fuses Mandarin and Hebrew to critique patriarchal desires and objectification, turning satire into resistance. These pieces introduce a new archetype of womanhood in Rosalía’s universe: one who is spiritual yet self-possessed, earthly yet transcendent.
The record’s orchestral centerpiece, “Berghain,” performed with the London Symphony Orchestra, has become a viral phenomenon. Its German lyrics and rising crescendos capture both the ecstasy and terror of transcendence. In contrast, “La rumba del perdón,” featuring Morente and Pérez Cruz, returns to her flamenco roots to tell a story of betrayal and survival, turning pain into ritual.
Other tracks like “Dios es un stalker” subvert theological imagery: here, God is a watchful, feminine force with an overflowing inbox of prayers, reluctant to intervene. In “La yugular,” she sings in Arabic about a love so consuming it could “tear heaven down and collapse hell.” And in “Memória,” a duet with Portuguese singer Carminho, she finds closure through a fado-inspired meditation on memory and forgiveness.
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The album closes with “Magnolias,” a haunting reflection on mortality that reaffirms LUX as both confession and celebration. Through it all, Rosalía positions herself not as a preacher but as a seeker. Her music becomes a form of prayer: sensual, intellectual, restless. “I’ve always felt this desire to be closer to God,” she told The New York Times, admitting that her faith and her art are inseparable drives toward freedom.
LUX is the sound of an artist unafraid of contradiction. It is spiritual but carnal, scholarly yet instinctive, Spanish yet universal. In building her own mythology, Rosalía transforms theology into pop and devotion into art, finding, in every crack, a way for the light to get in.
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