Is Rosalía’s Lux the 12 months’s finest album?

Over her transient discography, Rosalía has by no means met a conference she could not break.

Born in Barcelona, the singer has spent the final seven years innovating at a pace that makes her contemporaries look comically lazy.

Her breakthrough album El Mal Querer (recorded as her graduate thesis in 2018) took the folkloric traditions of Flamenco and fused them to addictive R&B rhythms.

The follow-up, 2022’s Motomami, was a wildly modern pop smash, twisting Latin American genres like cumbia and reggaeton round glitchy hip-hop beats and her playful, sinuous melodies.

With lyrics about fame, intercourse and self-discovery, Motomami debuted on the prime of Spotify’s world albums chart, took dwelling album of the 12 months on the Latin Grammys, and have become 2022’s best-reviewed report on Metacritic – even topping Beyoncé’s celebrated Renaissance.

After Rosalía’s tour for her critically acclaimed album ended three 12 months in the past, her followers had been left questioning the place she’d go subsequent.

The reply is revealed on her fourth album, Lux, launched on Friday.

Rather than stroll within the footsteps of its predecessors, Lux carves its personal, distinctive path – harnessing Rosalía’s classical coaching on the prestigious Catalonia College of Music.

Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, and that includes a number of preparations from Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, it is a radical, rebellious operatic opus that feels like nothing else within the pop sphere.

Lead single Berghain riffs on Verdi’s Dies Irae, the strings performed with serrated knives as a German refrain chants about concern and anger, till Bjork arrives to tell everybody, “the one technique to save us is thru divine intervention“.

Another early spotlight, Reliquia, chops and splices a chamber quartet into unrecognisable digital patterns, as Rosalía reconciles herself to the concept she loves too laborious, and locates the sweetness in that vulnerability.

“Take a chunk of me, preserve it for when I’m gone / I’ll be your treasure, I’m your relic.”

Fellow pop iconoclast Madonna has already declared herself a fan, posting a message to Rosalía on Instagram, saying: “I can’t stop listening! You are a true visionary!!!”

Pieced collectively over three years, Lux displays on a interval of non-public {and professional} upheaval for the 33-year-old.

In that point, Rosalía broke off her engagement to Puerto Rican reggaetón star Rauw Alejandro, ditched her administration in favour of Adele’s supervisor, Jonathan Dickins, and landed her first main appearing function within the teen drama Euphoria.

The break up from Alejandro appears to encourage the report’s most barbed lyric. La Perla is geared toward a person she calls an “emotional terrorist” and “the Olympic gold medallist of sons of whores” – with a jaunty waltz association that means she’s totally having fun with her litany of insults.

The cathartic Focu ‘Ranni (solely accessible on CD and vinyl copies) pairs a desolate melody with a scrambled vocal pattern; reflecting the emotional turmoil of a bride who calls off her wedding ceremony on the final second.

In an interview with France’s Le Monde, she stated the music was impressed by her namesake, Saint Rosalia de Palermo, who fled the altar to dedicate her life to God.

“I found that coincidence pretty insane,” the star added, however refused to elaborate, merely saying it was a “long story”.

The quest for non secular fulfilment underscores the remainder of Lux – whose title is the Latin phrase for “light”.

Sauvignon Blanc is a gossamer ballad that comprises the self-deprecating pledge: “I’ll hearken to my God / I’ll throw away my Jimmy Choos“; whereas the dazzling dopamine rush of Divinize finds her, within the phrase of Loki, burdened with wonderful function.

“Bruise me up, I’ll eat all of my satisfaction / I do know that I used to be made to divinize.“

But it is the extra reflective moments that steal your breath. The closing monitor, Magnolias, is a fragile acceptance of loss of life: “What I by no means did in my life, you may do when I’m useless.”

And the tender, subdued La Yagular is an acknowledgement of the divine on earth that celebrates our shared humanity.

“I match on this planet / And the world matches into me / I take up the world / And the world occupies me,” she sings, in wide-eyed surprise.

The music ends with a recording of Patti Smith in 1976, encouraging artists to shatter expectations.

“Break on through to the other side,” the rock star exclaimed. “Going through one door isn’t enough, a million doors aren’t enough.”

As an encapsulation of Rosalía’s artistic impulse, it is virtually too good.

Ahead of the album’s launch, the singer suggested followers to play Lux on headphones in a darkened room, calling it an antidote to TikTok tendencies and viral movies.

“The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” she told the New York Times. “I know it’s a lot to ask, but that’s what I want.”

Anyone who accepts the problem will likely be richly rewarded.

Despite its grand orchestral sweep, Lux is a totally trendy album, with leading edge manufacturing and hip-hop phrasing sneaking into Rosalía’s gorgeous, operatic vocals.

A lesser artist may need been crushed by its conceptual weight – singing in 14 languages, over 4 actions, impressed by the paranormal writings of French thinker Simone Weil – however one way or the other she avoids the entice.

“I just want to have fun making music,” she told Nick Grimshaw on BBC 6 Music, “and the only way is always trying to do it different. You want extremes. You want opposities.

“It’s como un péndulo (like a pendulum). In Motomami it was about inventing phrases. On Lux it is like, let me attempt to determine a technique to make lyrics that may be set in stone.”

The result is an album that’s audacious but accessible.

Turn off the lights, give it your full consideration, and uncover some of the singular, authentic artists of our time.