LUX

For ROSALÍA, her fourth full-length album LUX only has “little pieces” of her in the lyrics of its songs—and she prefers it that way. “I think the best fiction has this blurry line, the sweet spot between what’s personal and what’s universal, what’s detailed and what’s abstract, what’s implicit and what’s explicit,” the Spanish star tells Apple Music. “It’s both. Because I wrote it, there has to be some sort of truth for me in it. But at the same time, I think it’s much more about the other than about myself.” The “other”, in this case, is a group of saints—Saint Rose of Lima, Anandamayi Ma, Hildegard von Bingen, Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya and other martyrs across cultures, centuries and continents—that ROSALÍA voraciously studied in the wake of her third album, 2022’s MOTOMAMI. Instead of immediately writing about the emotional turmoil she’d weathered in its aftermath—a period that included the end of her engagement to former collaborator Rauw Alejandro—she found the muses of her next project in theology books. After immersing herself in the stories of these women of faith, ROSALÍA blended their experiences, and their tongues, with hers. “Where did they come from? What was the language that would be spoken there?” she says. “There were a lot of women that were extremely interesting to me that were nuns, they were poets. And I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to read what they actually wrote. I’m going to try to explain these stories.’” Across LUX, ROSALÍA sings in multiple languages—her native Spanish and Catalan, but also Arabic, Japanese, French, Portuguese, Italian, Ukrainian and German, among others—to invoke these saints while telling stories of flower-strewn funerals, doomed romance, unrequited love and crises of faith in multiple forms. If 2018’s EL MAL QUERER introduced her singular fusion of flamenco and pop to the world, and MOTOMAMI brought reggaetón into the mix, LUX builds on that work from a high-drama, operatic foundation, one that pairs her lyrical