Rosalía's Lux: A search for meaning in the doomscrolling era

In the social media era, where artists write singles with quick hooks and built-in dance trends designed to go viral on TikTok, Rosalía's new album Lux (Sony) refuses to follow the formula. There isn't a single song with an obvious, catchy chorus.

Instead, Lux asks the listener to slow down. The album contains 18 tracks, arranged in four sections, sung in 13 different languages - including Catalan, English, Latin, Hebrew, and Arabic - with lyrics full of symbols and hidden meanings.

It's music that takes time to understand. The kind of album you listen to quietly in your room, from beginning to end, actually paying attention.

In a time of fast dopamine hits and doom-scrolling, it's a risky move, especially in the mainstream pop world.

But Rosalía has managed to create a commercial album that feels anti-commercial, blending classical music, choral voices, and opera-like elements with her signature flamenco style and electronic textures.

What stands out most is her voice. With less editing and autotune than in her recent works, her singing feels clearer, warmer, and more direct. Almost heavenly.

The Catalan star also moves away from the themes of money and fame heard in Motomami (2022), and turns toward God.

The religious tone runs throughout the album, from lines like "I carry you with me always, Christ" to "I only make myself beautiful for God."

References to faith and spirituality appear not only in the lyrics, but also in the visuals and the album's overall concept.

Each of the four sections draws inspiration from a different saint and from traditions of feminine mysticism, recalling figures such as Jeanne d'Arc, Olga of Kyiv, and Hildegard of Bingen.

But religion here is not decoration. It is a way of expressing pain, longing, love, grief, desire, and the search for identity and the meaning of life.

"Ego sum nihil / Ego sum lux mundi," she sings in Latin on Porcelana, "I am nothing / I am the light of the world." A phrase that gives the album its name, and defines it.

Rosalía's search for identity and meaning becomes our own, and the result is a musical light unlike anything else in pop right now.

Lux captivates global press 

"Pop's most provocative chaos agent." That's how Rolling Stone opens its review of Lux, awarding the album a full five stars.  

The magazine calls it a record that "sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now," one that "no other pop star could have made."

The Guardian also gave Lux five stars, describing it as "a truly compelling, involving experience" that simply could not have been created "by anyone else."

"Rosalía's vocal performances are spectacular firework displays of talent: she seems just as comfortable in the presence of fado singers on La Rumba del Perdón as she does rapping, or belting as if she's on stage at the Royal Opera House," critic Alexis Petridis writes. 

And the enthusiasm is global. Die Zeit writes that "pop has a new goddess," while the Financial Times praises Lux as "an ambitious and unusual tribute to the European song tradition."

Chaos or genious? 

If the album itself resists the TikTok era, its release strategy does too. At a time when most artists tease new music for months with a string of singles, Rosalía did the opposite: she announced Lux just three weeks before its release and shared only one advance track, Berghain. 

Even so, the rollout was anything but smooth. The release date appeared prematurely on New York's Times Square billboards before Rosalía had officially announced it in Madrid's Plaza de Callao.

Two days before release, a track briefly went live on Spotify by accident before being taken down an hour later. And to top it all off, the entire album leaked online 48 hours early.

Whether these mishaps were intentional, part of a carefully engineered aura of mystery, or simply the result of internal chaos remains unclear.

Either way, the effect was the same: Lux has arrived surrounded by confusion, curiosity, and anticipation, amplified by the charisma that the Catalan has built across the world.

Listening party in Barcelona 

On Wednesday night, Rosalía hosted a listening party in Barcelona at the National Art Museum of Catalonia (MNAC), perched atop Montjuïc.

More than 900 people attended, mostly fans who had secured free tickets through an online registration, along with a number of celebrities, for an event unlike anything Rosalía has done before.

The singer stood alone at the center of the hall, dressed in white, almost angelic in presence, while the entire album played. She neither sang nor addressed the audience, and when the final track ended, she simply walked offstage to applause, without a word.

The audience listened in near silence, though some sections of the album earned spontaneous applause.

Before arriving in Barcelona, Rosalía had already presented Lux at listening events in Mexico City and New York.

Now, simultaneous listening sessions will be held in more than a dozen cities worldwide, including Amsterdam, Berlin, Bogotá, Buenos Aires, Lima, Lisbon, London, Milan, Paris, Santiago, Santo Domingo, São Paulo, Stockholm, Tokyo, and Toronto.

Sixena paintings controversy 

Just hours before the Barcelona event began, and even before the location was officially confirmed, an unrelated controversy erupted. 

Jorge Español, lawyer for the Aragonese town of Villanueva de Sixena, petitioned a judge in Huesca to block the listening party on the grounds that the sound vibrations could harm medieval mural paintings currently housed in the MNAC but claimed by the town's monastery.

The murals are displayed in a nearby room to the museum's Sala Oval, where the event took place. The lawyer argued that the volume could pose a risk to the fragile works.

"I don't know how many watts of music they plan to use in there, but it's very dangerous because everything will vibrate," Español said, adding that he would pursue legal action against the museum if the event went ahead.