When I drove to a soundstage in Hollywood this past December to interview the Spanish megastar Rosalía, her astonishing orchestral-pop album, Lux, had been out for a month and a day.
I arrived just as the sun went down. Rosalía’s rep had been cryptic about what she would be shooting, and I had assumed it was a second music video—at that point she had released only the video for “Berghain,” her brooding Berlin-techno-inspired single featuring Björk and Yves Tumor—or maybe another underwear campaign for Calvin Klein, for which she is an ambassador. But as I walked onto the studio lot, past a line of trucks and trailers humming in the night, it became clear that this was a much bigger production.
“It’s Euphoria,” another rep said a few minutes later. We were in a small meeting room next to the soundstage, waiting for the shoot to wrap. The rep was referring to Sam Levinson’s hit HBO show, the one about contemporary teenage life in Southern Californian suburbia. Rosalía has a role in the long-awaited third season—it comes out in April, after a four-year hiatus. (Nobody would disclose details about her part, but a trailer released a few weeks later revealed Rosalía as a stripper with a bedazzled neck brace.)
Soon she appeared in the doorway, so quietly that at first I didn’t realize who it was. Then she turned her head and I caught a glimpse of the halo—that ethereal blond ring she bleached into her otherwise dark hair, a defining feature of her Lux era. Rosalía, who is 33, was wearing a long black skirt by Ganni, YSL stiletto pumps, and a long-sleeve shirt with horizontal stripes in alternating colors—a very Miró palette of red, yellow, blue, green, and black. The shirt was from Radio Noia, a culture podcast out of Barcelona hosted by the journalist Mar Vallverdú, and it had this printed on the front in Catalan: “I DIDN’T ASK TO BE BORN WITH UNBEARABLE GIRL SYNDROME, I JUST GOT LUCKY.”
If you happen to have music-video Rosalía fresh in your mind—say, the one who flamenco-danced in a flame-shaped corset for her 2019 reggaeton collaboration with J Balvin, “Con Altura” (2.2 billion views)—meeting the actual person can generate some momentary dissonance. This was the case for me, anyway, in the intimate setting of that little room. The Rosalía I encountered there was serene and bookish, exuding a casual erudition that bordered on scholarly.
Over the hour and 40 minutes I spent with her, she referenced the Bible, the Quran, the Vedas, and the Therigatha; cited Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil and Holy Feast and Holy Fast by Caroline Walker Bynum; paraphrased quotes by the Spanish writer Alana S. Portero, the Ukraine-born Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector, and David Lynch; and praised Chris Kraus’s genre-bending novel-slash-memoir about erotic obsession, I Love Dick. “It’s so unexpected, the way she jumps from one place to another,” Rosalía said of Kraus’s book. “I love the freedom. How unapologetic she is.”
Although her singing voice is an instrument of raw power, Rosalía’s speaking voice can be smooth and mellifluous to the point of being hypnotic, more Sade than Édith Piaf. When she really gets going in English, and the words are pouring out, she imbues them with a distinct singsong intonation common in Castilian Spanish. If an English word escapes her, threatening to interrupt her flow, she will slip into Spanish long enough to finish the thought.
Rosalía speaks with her hands as well. Watching her gesticulate with the rise and fall of her speech, I thought of how she’s performed with inch-long talons, as in her flamenco cameo in the “WAP” video, and shared photos of intricate nail art, including one manicure inspired by Mexican lotería cards. Those ornate nails were gone now, clipped to librarian length and left nude.
There was so much about Lux to be knocked out by. The fact that Rosalía sings in 14 languages. The sweeping, cinematic strings, played by the London Symphony Orchestra and arranged on some of the songs by Caroline Shaw, the Pulitzer-winning composer who worked on The Life of Pablo. The liturgical, atmospheric background vocals, many of them sung by the Escolania de Montserrat, one of the oldest boys’ choirs in Europe, based at the Montserrat Monastery in Catalonia. The way these and other classical elements get consumed by electronics. And above all, Rosalía’s stunning voice, now soaring to operatic and celestial new heights.
Before she composed any of the music on Lux, Rosalía, I’d read, spent a year writing the lyrics in near isolation. This seemed remarkable, not least because so much pop music is written melody-first. How did an album this musically complex begin with lyrics alone?
“I was like, Okay, I’ve always started from music, and even if music rige mi vida,” Rosalía said, switching over to Spanish to convey that music rules her life. She repeated the phrase for emphasis: “La música rige mi vida. But even if that’s the case, this time, I have to do it from another place. And for me, this time, it was the words.”
Those words appear to tell a love story, or rather a heartbreak story. But the lyrics also amount to a theological inquiry and an incantation of sorts. Fifteen of the 18 songs were inspired by the stories of female saints and mystics; this was one reason for all the languages. To channel the medieval abbess and composer Saint Hildegard of Bingen, in “Berghain,” some lyrics would need to be sung in German. Channeling Saint Olga of Kyiv, in “De Madrugá,” would require Ukrainian. Teresa of Ávila would speak in Spanish (“Sauvignon Blanc”), Joan of Arc in French (“Jeanne”), Clare of Assisi in Italian (“Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti”), and so on.
During her year of writing, mostly in Los Angeles, Rosalía studied hagiographies. “So many of these saints were nuns, and I found it so amazing to learn about their lives, learn about how they would express themselves,” she said. “They would have an experience of God, and they would explain it with words. Just speaking. It was another way of knowledge, no? Another way of understanding lo divino.” She paused a beat. “And I feel like nowadays a lot of people reference celebrities, and celebrities reference celebrities. I prefer to reference saints.”
In the cover art for Lux, Rosalía wears a white headpiece that resembles a nun’s habit, designed by Maison Margiela. Below, her torso is constrained under a stretchy white garment that has no openings for her arms. The shirt, made by Alainpaul, evokes a straitjacket. “I was trying to find an image that would symbolize feminine spirituality,” Rosalía said. “To me this was the one that could translate how this album sounds, what this album is about, where I’m singing from, and the inspiration behind it.”
Lux has a symphonic structure—the 18 tracks are divided into four movements—but it unfolds more like an opera. The first song, “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas,” functions as an overture. In “Reliquia” we get a monologue over violin and a thumping electronic beat. “I lost my tongue in Paris, my time in LA / The heels in Milan, the smile in the UK,” she sings. It includes a bit of foreshadowing: “I’m not a saint, but I’m blessed.”
The emotional arc builds in “Divinize,” with piano, plucked strings, and a driving, syncopated beat. “Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary,” she sings. Soon we get an exquisite aria, in “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti.” Rosalía goes full coloratura, delivering lines like: “My king of anarchy, my favorite reckless star.” “Berghain,” the first real chorus scene, moves in like a hurricane. Rosalía-as-narrator likens herself to a sugar cube dissolving in coffee, and the ensemble practically chants in German: “His fear is my fear / His rage is my rage / His love is my love / His blood is my blood.” The chorus is singing these lines for a third time when the voice of Björk—whose early band was called the Sugarcubes—descends from above and bellows, “This is divine intervention.”
When “Berghain” came out, the title had a bait and switch effect. Because it is the name of a famous techno club in Berlin, listeners were extra surprised to hear the London Symphony Orchestra. But the word means “mountain grove” in German, and to Rosalía the double meaning felt right: “This forest of thoughts that you could get lost in, of course. But at the same time, how aggressive and beautiful techno can be. How, when rage is pure, it can be ecstatic. That’s part of it, part of the world of that song. Which is the most violent moment in the album.”
At the end of “Berghain,” the experimental musician Yves Tumor shouts, “I’ll fuck you till you love me”—over and over, eliminating words until he is left repeating only the last two. Love me. Love me. Love me. Love me. This threat turned plea was borrowed from Mike Tyson. At a press conference before a heavyweight championship fight in 2002, Tyson screamed it and other profane things at a journalist in the scrum—a reporter who had just suggested that Tyson ought to be put in a straitjacket.
There are flamenco elements here too. “Mundo Nuevo” is both an opera interlude and a reinterpretation of a petenera—a melancholic style of flamenco song—by one of Rosalía’s favorite singers, Pastora Pavón Cruz, known as La Niña de Los Peines, or the Girl of the Combs. “De Madrugá” is heavy on the Phrygian sound (the minor scale common in flamenco and Arabic music), melisma (when singers draw out one syllable for multiple notes), and palmas (rhythmic handclaps). In “La Yugular” she uses the word Undibel, which means “God” in Caló, the language of the Romani people in Spain.
On paper, this dense, uncategorizable, attention-span-requiring album wouldn’t strike even the most optimistic among us as ear candy. But in the first 24 hours after its release, Rosalía’s sprawling opus racked up more than 42 million plays on Spotify, making it the most-streamed album in a single day by a Spanish-speaking woman artist. Lux went on to become Spotify’s most-played album that week, briefly overtaking Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl. It also made Rosalía the first artist to have a No. 1 record across five Billboard album charts simultaneously: Latin, Latin Pop, Classical, Classical Crossover, and World.
In some ways the most impressive feat involved a different metric. When Lux was released, 12 out of 15 songs on the digital version made Spotify’s Global Top 50 daily chart. The high streaming numbers across a large portion of the songs suggested that people were listening to this very intense album in its entirety, possibly from start to finish.
Even the breakaway hit was unexpected. Of all the songs on Lux, one might have guessed that “Berghain” would get the most streams. Instead, this distinction has gone to “La Perla,” a comically direct excoriation—“Hello, peace thief,” it begins—delivered over the pulse of a waltz and inspired by the late Mexican balladeer Paquita la del Barrio’s iconic insult song, “Rata de Dos Patas.” (That title in English: “Two-Legged Rat.”) Certain verses and harmonies on “La Perla” are sung by Yahritza Martínez, the lead vocalist of Yahritza y Su Esencia, a trio of siblings from Washington State’s Yakima Valley who have a huge following on YouTube. As I write this, Rosalía’s oompah-pah diss track is approaching 150 million streams.
“I’m shocked,” Yahritza told me over Zoom from Yakima. “I honestly don’t know how to feel.” She and her two brothers, Armando and Jairo, who were also on the call, did not know that Rosalía had taken inspiration from the Paquita la del Barrio anthem. “All our family, our grandma, our aunts, they love that song,” Jairo said. “To us, because we’re Mexican—we heard that song growing up—that is so dope. We made the new version of ‘Rata de Dos Patas’ with Rosalía.”
As it turned up on year-end best-album lists, Lux also provided potent grist for the content mill. How did Rosalía sing in 14 languages? (With help from Google Translate and human translators.) Since “La Perla” (“The Pearl”) is also the name of a neighborhood in San Juan, is that song a takedown of her former fiancé, Rauw Alejandro? (Who knows? Rosalía is careful not to talk about her private life.) Is Lux part of the whole Christiancore aesthetic thing? (Maybe.) Is it even pop? (Depends on whom you ask.)
When I interviewed her for this article, Patti Smith—whose voice we hear at the end of “La Yugular,” via a spliced-in clip from an old Horses-era interview—seemed to offer the best answer to that last question, even though I never asked it. “What is a pop star?” Smith said by phone. “Someone who is popular with the people. So do the finest work that you can, to elevate their consciousness. Whether it’s in a dance song or a song that’s more operatic. I have a lot of respect for what Rosalía is doing, and I love the record.”
For all of Rosalía’s emphasis on words—her team requested that journalists listen to the album in the dark, with the lyrics at hand—Lux was stirring listeners on a visceral level. One of the first people she played it for, in a dark room, was Sam Levinson. “He cried, and that was shocking to me,” Rosalía said. “I’ve never seen him like that. I kind of felt like this was a sign that I was on the right path, because that’s how I made this album. I made this album in tears.”
Levinson told me later: “While shooting, we had discussed her album and the ideas that lead to season three and were both surprised by their thematic and religious alignment. When I heard Lux for the first time, I was deeply moved. ‘Divinize’ is when it hit me. She created a truly transcendent work of art.”
I learned of Rosalía’s pop opera when a friend in London texted me about it in November. At that moment, I was seven months into cancer treatment and in something of a cocoon, spending less time than usual online. I put the album on the next time I was in my car. As I drove to the grocery store, listening to the first few songs in stunned awe, my mind was taken to a different place. Then came the aria, with Rosalía’s coloratura runs, her voice alternating between soft mezza-voce high notes and powerful shows of strength.
Lux may be about the lyrics, but I didn’t need to know Italian in order to understand “Mio Cristo” any more than one needs to understand German to know that Beethoven’s Ninth is about joy. And perhaps because the devastating beauty of Rosalía’s voice could reflect in some elemental way the ordeal I had been through—both the physical discomfort and the euphoria of surviving it—the aria leveled my defenses and left me gutted. For a few minutes in a Ralphs parking lot, I sat in my car and sobbed uncontrollably.
There’s an anecdote from Rosalía Vila Tobella’s childhood that may describe the first time she knew she had duende, the flamenco term for an ineffable ability to elicit emotion from an audience. When she was seven years old, her father asked her to sing at a family gathering. Rosalía obliged—she sang an unremarkable song she had learned from the TV—and when she opened her eyes, everyone was in tears.
Rosalía describes her hometown in Catalonia, Sant Esteve Sesrovires, as a landscape of two extremes. “It’s a village where there’s a lot of nature. A lot of forest. Beautiful. But also a lot of fábricas,” she said, meaning factories. “Industrial area all around it. A lot of trucks. I remember, since I was a kid, always running around in the forest.”
Her mother, Pilar, ran a family business manufacturing metal plaques. Her father, José Manuel, worked in industrial construction. She knew it was the weekend when her parents played music: David Bowie, Queen, Supertramp, Prince. “My mom, she showed me Kate Bush since I was very young,” she said. “I didn’t appreciate it, but with years, it grew on me. I really like that song where she explains this possibility of exchanging places with God. A deal with God. It would always make me cry.”
Rosalía didn’t hear flamenco music at home, but it was always around. Not long after she started taking guitar lessons, at age nine, she learned to play a Paco de Lucía song, along with “Blackbird.” Later, when she was 13, she heard the voice of Camarón de la Isla for the first time, blaring from a friend’s car stereo. “I remember thinking that it was one of the most honest voices I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said. “It awakened in me the desire to study flamenco.”
For a few years, this was something Rosalía did by herself. She would listen to Camarón’s albums and sing along. “No guidance, no anything.” By 16 she had met her maestro—José Miguel Vizcaya, a.k.a. El Chiqui de la Línea, with whom she would go on to study for eight years—but she had also blown out her vocal cords, requiring surgery and a year of rehabilitation. “When I could sing again, I really wanted to learn the right way, the safe way, for my voice,” she said. And so Rosalía started studying classical singing.
In 2011, when she was 19, Rosalía walked the Camino de Santiago across northern Spain. Although her immediate family wasn’t devout, she had always loved the rituals of Catholicism, especially the singing. “My grandma Rosalía, from my mom’s side, she would take my sister, my cousins, and I to church. Maybe once a year, once every two years. It would be something special.” Alone for around 33 days on the pilgrimage route, she meditated on her goal of becoming a professional musician. “I was like, If I can do this camino from the beginning until the end, that’s going to be for me a sign that later I can dedicarme a la música.”
Rosalía followed Chiqui to Barcelona’s premier music conservatory—La Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC)—where she’d earned the one spot per year the school has for a student who wants to specialize in flamenco singing. (Rosalía has established a scholarship at the school, and when they accepted two exceptional students for the current year, she paid for both.)
Around the time that Rosalía graduated, the director Pedro Almodóvar saw her perform in an old theater in Madrid. “Rosalía sang sitting on a chair, like the old flamenco singers used to do,” Almodóvar recalled in an email. “I was struck by this detail, which was, let’s say, canonical for a performance that wasn’t. I was surprised by her mastery of the different styles of flamenco.” He added: “From the very first moment, her extraordinary vocal ability was evident, and although she sounded like an old-school flamenco singer, everything about her was different and new.”
Later, Almodóvar cast her in his 2019 film, Pain and Glory, as a country girl, washing clothes in a river alongside Penélope Cruz. “There was a loud noise from the river current,” Almodóvar said. “I wanted to record with direct sound. To do this, I needed a singer with a powerful voice who could sing a cappella and be heard: Rosalía has that powerful voice, and even though she’s a city girl, she could easily pass for a young woman from the countryside.”
Rosalía’s first album, Los Ángeles, released in 2017 when she was still at the conservatory, is a semi-traditional flamenco album that has a former punk musician on guitar (Raül Refree) and a cover of Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness.” Her second, El Mal Querer, a flamenco-pop hybrid that began as her baccalaureate thesis, is based on a 13th-century Occitan novel called Flamenca and includes a song that interpolates Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” (It won Best Latin Rock Album at the Grammys and Album of the Year at the Latin Grammys.)
Because her first two albums relied on guitar, she had a no-guitars rule for her third, Motomami, a loop-heavy experiment in which she jumps from reggaeton and jazz to trap and bachata, references Lil’ Kim and M.I.A., and, on “Bizcochito,” lets us know: “I didn’t base my career on making hits / I have hits because I formed the basis.” (Again, she won the Grammy for Best Latin Rock Album, as well as four Latin Grammys.)
Going into Lux, Rosalía made a new rule: No loops. She wanted to spend less time in front of a computer, to use her instrument more, to really sing.
“I wanted it to be más físico,” she said. “Music in its physical state. That can be instruments, objects. It can be human. It can be the air, the metal, the wood. And the orchestra, in a way, I feel it’s maybe the most monumental version of that. Of music in its physical form.”
As Rosalía was finishing Lux, she came across an essay by Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” In it, Le Guin floats the idea that the first important human tool may not have been a weapon for hunting, but rather a container for gathering edible or beautiful things so that they could be kept or eaten later or taken to a holy place. Rosalía felt a strong sense of recognition. “It was very interesting for me to find, because I felt so connected to this feminine approach,” she said.
Rosalía’s libretto gathers voices; so too did her recording process. There is Björk, the Escolania boys’ choir, Yahritza y Su Esencia, Patti Smith, Yves Tumor, and others too—like the two Spanish singers Estrella Morente and Sílvia Pérez Cruz, and Carminho, the Portuguese fado singer who enthralled Emma Stone’s character in Poor Things. Among the producers and collaborators she brought in—like Caroline Shaw, Noah Goldstein, and Dylan Wiggins—she added Charlotte Gainsbourg and the Puerto Rican composer and instrumentalist Angélica Negrón. Listening to the end result, however, makes you wonder if the saints, sinners, nuns, mystics, singers, shouters, and icons on the record are there to represent the various positions and states of one voice, of a single consciousness wrestling with herself.
I may have gotten an answer when I spoke to Carminho, with whom Rosalía sings “Memória,” the gorgeous fado song toward the end, in which a narrator is revealed to be talking not to a beloved, but to herself. Carminho told me she had written the song for her own album, but that when Rosalía heard it, she asked if she could please put a version of it on Lux. Carminho hadn’t heard the rest of the album but once she did, she understood: “I thought, Of course.”
Some of the other collaborators had similar experiences when they saw how their part fit into the whole. Shaw likened Lux to an Old Master painting. “I think of those Renaissance painters, where there’s a whole workshop of people,” Shaw said. “One person is brought in to do a particular fabric in this section of the painting. One person’s really an expert in shadows on trees. You’re bringing what you can, and then you get to stand back and say, ‘Oh wow, what a beautiful conception.’ ”
Rosalía is rarely in one place for long. She has spent most of the past two years in Los Angeles and Miami, with periodic trips to Spain to visit family. Pilar, her mother, is on her management team, and sometimes travels with her. As does her older sister, Pili, who helps oversee all things visual as both a stylist and creative director. “I don’t know what it is to be in the world without her,” Rosalía said of Pili. “That’s how important she’s been in my life.”
When she’s in album-promotion mode, Rosalía deploys fashion references in savvy ways. In an image from the Lux rollout, she kneels in prayer while wearing lace-up corset gloves from Jean Paul Gaultier’s spring 2004 collection. To lie on Bella Freud’s couch for an episode of Fashion Neurosis, she wore the rosary-bead heels from Alexander McQueen’s spring 2003 season. (The same sandals appear in the “Berghain” video.) And a few days after our interview in LA, she was photographed going to dinner in West Hollywood wearing a pleated minidress with a piano-key motif—a nod to Moschino’s mid-’90s piano dress.
Rosalía was blessedly not in promotion mode on a recent trip to Rio, where she danced at a party in the Rocinha favela wearing drawstring shorts and a bikini top and rang in the New Year on Ipanema Beach with the French model Loli Bahia. “I love Brazil,” she said by phone from Barcelona in mid-January. “I find it very inspiring. I love being at the beach there. I love the music. I’m a big fan of Caetano Veloso and Elis Regina.” Rosalía explained that when she traveled to Rio in late November, to host a listening party beneath the city’s 125-foot-tall Christ the Redeemer statue, she was unable to stay for more than a day. “So I couldn’t really, like, understand what Rio is, and I wanted to understand,” she said. “I really wanted to experience New Year’s in Brazil in such a special way.”
Video of Rosalía and Bahia running hand-in-hand into the surf fueled rumors of a possible romance, as did photos of the two holding hands in Paris in early January. Was Rosalía—who told Radio Noia that she was “volcel” (voluntarily celibate) in October; who told the Spanish talk show La Revuelta that she was in “una época de celibato” the following month; and who can now be seen rocking a chastity belt in the new video for “La Perla”—no longer practicing abstinence? On that: “This is something very personal, that I think depends on the moment in life, and you can transitar or not.”
When she does stop in one city for a stretch of time, Rosalía likes to resume lessons in various subjects. “I love boxing, and I love ballet,” she said, summing up her proclivity for stark contrasts and extremes. She also likes to cook. An ex taught her to make good pasta all’Amatriciana, and she has a solid recipe for her favorite Nigerian dish, egusi soup and fufu, thanks to “a mix of a lover and YouTube and life.” In November, on her eponymous Substack, she shared “a recipe I’ve made ten thousand times” for orange and olive oil cake. More recently she’s been trying to master a very specific style of Spanish tortilla. “I’m obsessed with the Betanzos one,” she said. “So creamy on the inside. More cooked on the outside.”
There won’t be much cooking in 2026. The Lux world tour begins on March 16, in Lyon, France. “We are in rehearsals right now,” Rosalía said. “We are starting to build it out.” Will she bring an orchestra? “I cannot say yet. I can say that definitely there’s going to be experimentation, and hopefully rigor and playfulness at the same time.” She added: “It’s going to be very different than the Motomami tour.”
When the third season of Euphoria begins airing, on April 12, Rosalía will be in Barcelona. (She is also the face of three new Calvin Klein Euphoria elixirs, out in March. One is a musky vanilla—“very sensual, I would wear it on a date”—and another smells a lot like a dessert one of her friends used to make: “a crepe cake with mango and cream.”) About the show, she told me there are unplanned “sincronicidades” between her character and her life. “There was a bridge, which was a surprise to me,” she said. “There was a connection that I didn’t see coming.” Was it difficult for her to cede creative control to someone else? “I think because I’m always como la directora, or the captain of my project, it’s very fun, or a different experience for me, to do the opposite, to be in service of someone else’s vision.” About casting her, Levinson said: “Rosalía gave a terrific audition. She’s a great character. Funny, tough, emotional. I also love her accent. She was perfect for the part.”
Although Rosalía is guarded about her private life, in the “ROSALÍA” newsletter she offers writerly glimpses into a more personal side. In one recent post, she recalled that when her grandmother Lucrecia, who wore a drugstore version of Chanel No. 5, would slip money into her pocket on her birthday, “the veins in her hands bulged from her purse like tree roots in LA.” In another, she wrote: “Leonard Cohen used to say everyone has a song. If it’s true that every poet has a poem, every filmmaker a film, and every musician a song inside them, then I hope I never find mine.” In that little room in Hollywood, I asked her why. “When I do an album, I always end up with more questions than answers,” she replied. “It’s okay not to get the answers I desire, because that makes me want to make another album. I always keep trying to find the song.”
In this story: hair, Irinel de León; makeup, Yadim; manicurist, Kim Truong; tailor, Hasmik Kourinian for Susie’s Custom Designs.
Produced by Fresh Produce. Set Design: Hugh Zeigler.
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