Rosalía Album Overview: “Lux” | The New Yorker

Sometimes it appears as if everybody desires to be a pop girlie. Last yr, Taylor Swift counted herself among the many “tortured poets,” however these days she is a self-described “showgirl,” having launched a brief album filled with bite-size songs co-produced by the distinguished hitmakers Max Martin and Shellback. The yr’s greatest new musical act might be Huntr/x, the fictional woman group from the animated Netflix movie “KPop Demon Hunters.” When Demi Lovato, the previous Disney teen idol, needed to return to her roots, she launched “Fast,” a superbly superficial membership observe; the accompanying album is named, appropriately, “It’s Not That Deep.” Even MGK, the rapper turned rocker, tried to reinvent himself earlier this yr with a video known as “Cliché,” during which he danced and lip-synched like a boy-bander determined for one final hit. It was an amusing pivot, though it impressed such intense mockery that MGK felt moved to file an Instagram reel explaining himself. “It’s a pop song, man,” he mentioned.

In this manner and in lots of others, Rosalía is phenomenal. She is a educated flamenco singer from Spain who discovered a world viewers in 2018, when she launched “El Mal Querer,” an album filled with diaphanous flamenco-pop experiments, which additionally served as her thesis mission on the prestigious Catalonia College of Music. Rosalía’s sound, filled with curlicued vocal melodies and exact hand-clap rhythms, didn’t resemble anything within the pop universe, however Rosalía herself was clearly a star, and she or he adopted the album with a sequence of high-profile collaborations, together with reggaetón hits with J Balvin (“Con Altura”) and Bad Bunny (“LA NOCHE DE ANOCHE”). With her fierce, beat-driven album “MOTOMAMI” (2022), she took her place among the many Spanish-language artists who’ve recently remodeled standard music. But as of late she has one thing completely different in thoughts. When she introduced that the primary single from her new album was going to be known as “Berghain,” some followers anticipated dance music—Berghain is the identify of the world’s most well-known techno membership, in Berlin. What they received, as an alternative, was primarily a three-minute opera, full with an orchestral overture and a visitor look by the avant-garde singer and composer Björk, who arrives as a deus ex machina, howling, “This is divine intervention.” The accompanying album, “Lux,” seems to be a pointy swerve away from the logic of the pop financial system, during which songs compete to offer essentially the most pleasure to the most individuals. “Lux” sounds much less like a streaming playlist and extra like a cult movie, or maybe an artwork set up: there are fifteen songs (eighteen on the vinyl and CD variations), divided into 4 actions, with lyrics in 13 completely different languages, and Rosalía’s most fixed companion isn’t the beat of reggaetón however fairly the swooping and swelling of the London Symphony Orchestra. Having conquered the pop world with ease, Rosalía is now embracing issue.

A sure recalcitrance has at all times been a part of what makes Rosalía so compelling. As a teen-ager, she appeared on “Tú Sí Que Vales,” a talent-competition present on Spanish tv; when one decide wasn’t impressed, she mentioned, in Spanish, “I didn’t come here to accept criticism,” and the viewers whooped in encouragement. Early in her profession, she was typically celebrated for fleeing the strictures of flamenco music as a way to discover freedom on the dance ground, and on the charts. But dance flooring and charts have their very own guidelines, and one of many features of an album as intense and expansive as “Lux” is to remind pop listeners of all the boundaries that they sometimes take without any consideration. The album has a notably huge dynamic vary, which signifies that listeners who lean in in the course of the quiet passages could discover themselves blasted backward by the thunderous climaxes. In “De Madrugá,” she sings just a few traces in Ukrainian to evoke the fervor of Olga of Kiev, the tenth-century ruler who massacred the tribe answerable for killing her husband. And for “Mio Cristo” she principally wrote herself an Italian aria after which discovered to sing it, constructing to an excellent excessive B-flat that she hits and holds; we hear a fast snippet of Rosalía’s studio banter (“That’s going to be the energy, and then—”) earlier than the orchestra cuts her off with the reverberant closing word. Pop stars typically speak about working exhausting, however Rosalía makes most of her friends appear lazy, and, certainly, any listener not inclined to embark upon a multilingual analysis mission could find yourself feeling a bit lazy, too. Rosalía’s representatives requested journalists to hearken to this album at nighttime, whereas studying the lyrics on a display—logically inconceivable, for many of us, however probably Rosalía herself might discover a manner.

There is a narrative to “Lux,” or possibly there are just a few completely different tales. The lyrics trace at love, betrayal (one music contains the phrase “un terrorista emocional”), revenge, and acceptance. The mixed impact may be exhausting, in methods Rosalía’s earlier albums by no means had been: the twists and turns of “La Yugular,” a theological exploration impressed by Islam, are simpler to admire than to get pleasure from—not less than till the finale, a pleasingly earthy clip from an outdated Patti Smith interview. Sometimes the lightest moments are essentially the most affecting, comparable to when, in “Reliquia,” Rosalía floats into her higher register, delivering a luxurious and faintly sacrilegious expression of affection and loss. “I’ll be your relic / I am your relic,” she sings, in Spanish, and for a second all of it appears easy.

Like nearly all musicians, Rosalía appears to have combined emotions about how separate she desires to be, actually, from the pop market. “I need to think that what I’m doing is pop, because otherwise I don’t think, then, that I am succeeding,” she advised the New York Times, in a current interview. “What I want is to do music that, hopefully, a lot of people can enjoy.” But in fact that’s not all she desires. The single most shocking contributor to “Lux” is Mike Tyson, who throughout a chaotic 2002 press convention advised a journalist, “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.” This phrase, with out the incendiary closing phrase, interrupts the in any other case elegant coda of “Berghain,” shouted just a few instances by the digital producer Yves Tumor. The interruption is a shock—startling sufficient, maybe, to dissuade some listeners from including the music to their favourite streaming playlists, lest it break the temper. Maybe that’s the concept. Music-streaming providers encourage us to combine and match, so maybe in addition they encourage us to spend extra time listening to songs that match pleasantly alongside different songs. A small however important variety of musicians have begun to withhold their music from these retailers, some for financial causes (the websites don’t pay a lot), some for political causes (Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, can be the chairman of a military-technology firm), and a few for no said cause in any respect. The new Rosalía album is accessible in all places, but it surely echoes this need to withdraw from an enormous, messy system, within the hope of encouraging listeners to interact in a extra intentional, single-minded manner; it’s an album that’s not designed to be ubiquitous, or to slide easily into our lives and playlists. “Lux” desires to make us cease no matter we’re doing and hear, which inevitably signifies that it’s much less broadly interesting—much less listenable, in a way—than albums that ask much less. It’s additionally a lot more durable to overlook. ♦