Music Review: Rosalía's 'Lux' is unlike anything in mainstream music — thank God

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NEW YORK (AP) — Before Rosalía became an international pop powerhouse, she was Rosalía Vila Tobella, a student of flamenco at the hypercompetitive Catalonia College of Music. There, she learned Spain's folkloric traditions. And then she broke away from them, bringing heritage performance into modern style.

On her fourth studio album, her sonic rebellions have come full circle. “Lux” is an offbeat, full-hearted embrace of her classical training through huge orchestral movements. It is also a demanding collection meant for keen listeners. That is accomplished with the use of 13 different languages, a phonetic miracle all performed by Rosalía. If there is a single avant-garde saving grace in the pop music landscape, it's here. It's maximalist, it's “Lux.”

The first taste of “Lux” was “Berghain,” named after the famed Berlin club, featuring Björk, a Catalan choir, the experimentalist Yves Tumor and the London Symphonic Orchestra. Allow that to be its own kind of provocation: Berghain is known for debauchery; Rosalía positions her “Berghain” as a kind of divinity, singing in a distinctly operatic style — one of the album's central themes explored with a kind of Nick Cave-esque ethos.

“This is divine intervention,” Björk joins the orchestra. “The only way to save us is through divine intervention.” Yves Tumor jumps in with their own solace, quoting Mike Tyson’s profane 2002 attack on Lennox Lewis. Surprises, Rosalía has a few.

It's been three years since the celebrated “Motomami” further cemented her unique position as a genre-agnostic talent, one who could combine flamenco with reggaeton, bachata, future-tech and Björk-indebted ballads. It was clear then that Rosalía offered something in fiercely short supply in the modern pop landscape — something truly new, asymmetrical — as well as offering something quite familiar: concerns around cultural appropriation. Rosalía, a white Catalan woman, was experimenting with Afro-Caribbean genres like dembow, and receiving worldwide acclaim for it. But those looking for “Motomami” will be hard-pressed to find it on the 18-track, hourlong “Lux." The album is less concerned with Latin trap club bangers and instead delves into a profound contemporary classicism in sound and stylistic Catholicism in content.

Hits, here, are hidden and unusual — “Porcelana,” performed partially in Japanese, “De Madrugá,” with its Ukrainian and unexpected key change, the movements of “Dios Es Un Stalker” and the swaying “La Perla,” which will no doubt inspire fan theories about Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro.

Joys, however, are not hard to parse. Like the ancestral rhythms of “La Rumba Del Perdón,” written with El Guincho (a frequent collaborator who doesn't make many appearances on the album), or the ascendant and operatic “Mio Cristo,” performed entirely in Italian. Stay tuned for the break at the end, where the curtain is pulled back for a brief second on Rosalía's process. “That's gonna be the energy,” she smiles after a refined falsetto. “And then—” she's cut off by its cinematic coda.

Singing in different languages, for Rosalía, functions like accessing different instruments each with their own phrasing. Where words like “experimental” and “avant-garde” can connote a kind of otherworldliness — looking elsewhere for inspiration — “Lux” is, in some ways, grounded in Earth; it is innovative because it endeavors to connect with the world through words and sonic movements. Humanity is an arduous tightrope to walk across such an ambitious collection.

“If I could, I would have sung in all the languages of the world,” Rosalía said during a press conference in Mexico City last week. “If I could, I would have put the whole world on this record.”

That much is clear. “Lux” is a record that Rosalía could not have created before this moment. There's also a sense that the title “Lux,” is more like “Luxe” and less like the Latin word for “light,” in reference to the album's grandeur and orchestration. It could also suggest the luxury of time. In an industry that is subject to instant gratification brought on by algorithmic unrealities, where pop stars are expected to tour and release albums on yearlong cycles, Rosalía agonized over an album far more complex and iconoclastic than obvious, the result of big business pressures. Give it real attention, give it real active listening, and there are real pleasures to be unearthed.

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AP Entertainment Writer Berenice Bautista contributed reporting from Mexico City.

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“Lux” by Rosalía

Four and a half stars out of five.

On repeat: “Porcelana,” “La Perla,” “La Rumba Del Perdón”

Skip it: “Sauvignon Blanc”

For fans of: The classics, summiting mountains, supernaturalism, Kate Bush