At first glance, this album might appear closer to a challenging scholarly challenge than a new pop album from an artist who just had a last hit featured a global K-pop star. Divided into 4 separate movements and performed in thirteen tongues, it is a breathtaking symphonic opus that delves into female mystery, religious transcendence, and physical transformation, often through the lens of different female saints. The end of a relationship—a topic treated with grounded openness on another major 2025 album—is launched upwards on this record, buoyed by the lush presence of a full orchestra and input from a Pulitzer-winning composer within a long roll call of collaborators. The pure audacity by itself makes the efforts of other artists appear quite modest.
Transcending Academic Exercise
That this album manages to transcend overly intellectual chin-stroking is nothing short of miraculous, with full praise belonging to Rosalía. While it's not her first album to alchemize the past with modern styles, its stakes are much greater on Lux, with the balancing act far more dramatic. What truly raises this fourth release, outside of its multilayered melodies, rich arrangements, and engrained theatricality, proves to be an essential sense of playfulness. Similar to the legendary artist at her height, you find a captivating sense to the vocalist's singing that pulls you up in its tornado. When she is breaking your heart apart, you still desire to stay right there through the journey.
A Signature Example of Joy
That playful energy comes forth clearly during a stirring Italian ballad about a saint. It bathes in a string-drenched whirlpool over several minutes. Then, everything falls away, to reveal there's a spontaneous laugh followed by a declaration prior to a comically exaggerated string crescendo thuds in with cartoonish impact. The song immediately shifts into the wild single featuring galloping strings, an imposing choral group, and a surprise appearance from the artist herself.
"The charm with this album is that you rarely quite understand—nor wish to know—what you will go to next."
Nearly each song ends at a totally different place than how it began. A track explores the fleeting nature of celebrity with a featherlight orchestration before disintegrating in electronic chaos. Another, a song that recalls her previous trap-infused work starts out dark and brooding, featuring menacing beats, before sudden traditional handclaps and an angelic chorus enter to soften the song's jagged edges.
The Balance Of Art & Pop
A key balancing act on Lux is straddling the line of bold innovation and broad accessibility. It is little surprise that it has become the artist's highest-charting work to break into the Top 5 of major charts: at its core a collection of truly undeniable pop songs. A song sung primarily in the English language builds on a refrain that seems to collect more and more infectious hooks while it spins skyward. This trick is repeated on a different powerful track that grows and contracts, weaving multiple tunes like an intricate weave.
- A waltz-like number charms via its playful, Disney-adjacent flair and a chant-along hook.
- In its words, it aligns the cultural honesty of contemporary heartbreak songs, lambasting an ex- lover labeled an "emotional terrorist".
- Across the album, the singing carry a painted-on edge, like a storybook character hiding a knife: "Gold medal in being a scoundrel / You have won the trophy of disappointment."
A Maximalist Feast for the Ears
Lux is popular music on a maximalist level, an ambitious grasp for capital-A artistry in an era of impending AI-generated sameness. It eschews solipsism for glorious elevation, creating an over-the-top drama that skillfully controls its built-in excess. It is a deep well of hidden treasure that takes patience to completely mine but doesn't seem like hard work. Where other big releases of the year seemed like a meager meal, Lux offers a sumptuous banquet at which the characters at it, perhaps intoxicated on sacred drink, flutter between conversations about historical figures, the galvanizing feeling of soul-shattering grief, and shared gossip about hopeless men. It is a contemporary musical from pop's truly endlessly creative visionary.
