On the cover art of her latest album, Lux, Spanish superstar Rosalía poses in a white nun’s habit, arms bundled to suggest straight-jacket confinement or maybe self-love. Before anyone heard a note of the new music, the internet was already bubbling over with commentary, par for the course when it comes to the complicated pop auteur. Fans and haters alike wondered what the Catholic imagery might mean. Habit aside, had Rosalía gone tradwife? Even Ikea joined in on the pre-release conversation, posting a version of the album cover with an overhead lamp. In Latin, Lux means light.
The album is a visionary landmark in pop music. Largely departing from previous forays into flamenco fusion and experimental reggaeton, Rosalía primarily draws from the classical tradition for the project, recording with the London Symphony Orchestra and pushing her voice into new operatic territory. Oh, and she sings in 13 different languages.
Each of these choices has triggered ever-permutating discussions of their own: Is the album classical or pop? Does her use of Catalan square with separatist politics? What does it mean that she’s embracing a European aesthetic now, after initially finding international success by borrowing from chart-topping Caribbean genres?
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Unsurprisingly, the religion chatter has crescendoed too. As Rosalía’s habit suggests, the album really is about God, in a rich, deeply felt way. In interviews, the artist has spoken specifically about finding inspiration in the hagiographies of female saints and mystics across the major world religions, like Catholic warrior Joan of Arc, Taoist poet Sun Bu’er, and Hindu teacher Anandamayi Ma. With Lux, she’s created the most substantial engagement with faith in internationally popular music since Kanye West’s Jesus Is King (to mention another complicated auteur, whose Yeezus collaborator Noah Goldstein also worked on Lux).
She lays out her spiritual dilemma on the opening track “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas”—sex, violence and tires, the world’s material grime. “If only one could come from the earth / Enter heaven and return to the earth / So that between the earth and heaven / There would never be a floor,” she sings over soaring strings. Heaven versus earth, the spiritual versus the physical. It’s a simple dichotomy that she’ll spend the rest of the album complicating.
Some figures in the church have been encouraged to see such a huge star take up heavenly matters. “When a creator like Rosalía speaks of spirituality, it means that she grasps a deep need in contemporary culture to get closer to spiritual considerations, to foster an inner life, to value religious experience as a fundamental experience,” said Portuguese Cardinal José Tolentino. Other commentators, like Javier Gallego, host of the popular leftist podcast Carne Cruda, see the Catholic thing as more problematic. “Let her embrace spirituality however she pleases,” he said on an episode analyzing “pop Catholicism.” “But please, I beg you, let’s not present entering monasteries and convents as a liberating option, because churches are not liberating. They are quite the opposite.”
But Rosalía is an unlikely mouthpiece for the institutional Catholic Church, with its dogmas and hierarchy. Throughout her career, she has consistently celebrated total autonomy as a virtue and pursued it as an artistic objective. “I’m very much my own / I transform myself,” she sings on “Saoko,” the playful single from her 2022 Latin Grammy-winning album Motomami. She’s not exactly the revolutionary some would want her to be either; the freedom that runs through her discography is mostly apolitical and individualistic.
On Lux, she’s neither out to subvert religious authority nor obey it. Church is the setting more than the subject, an entry point into a more universal (if nonthreatening) spiritual realm. The artist is still preoccupied with personal freedom, but this time she’s ultimately searching for it in spirituality. And like the women she cites as influences, among them Hildegard von Bingen and Teresa of Ávila, her articulation of divine presence is far from straightforward.
On the propulsive “Divinize,” sung in Catalan and English, she pursues an “absence that satisfies,” echoing philosopher Simone Weil, another thinker who informed her writing process. On “Berghain,” a choir chants in German that “his fear is my fear / his rage is my rage / his love is my love / his blood is my blood.” It’s not crystal clear who “he” is, but the language evokes the ecstatic—and terrifying—experiences of divine union described by mystics like Teresa. Rosalía’s God, like the God of scripture, can feel both elusive and intimately, unsettlingly close.
Later in the album, after a gorgeous Italian aria inspired by the friendship between saints Clare and Francis of Assisi (“Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti”) and a waltzing breakup anthem that christens an ex-lover as an “emotional terrorist” (“La Perla”), Rosalía steps into God’s own spacious shoes. “Dios Es Un Stalker” is the result of an experiment on the part of the pop star to write from the Most High’s perspective, a task she called “absurd” in an interview. “I go behind you / Me, who always waits for others to come to me / I don’t like to do divine intervention / But I’m going to stalk my baby,” she sings on one of the album’s catchiest pop hooks. One can almost hear it stuck in Jonah’s head as he got belched up on Mediterranean shores. “Omnipresence has me drained / but I’m going to kidnap this heart and chase it down mercilessly,” this God-as-obsessive-lover assures (threatens?) us.
Rosalía’s God, like the God of scripture, can feel both elusive and intimately, unsettlingly close.
While Catholicism provides most of the imagery for Lux, its most transcendent moment is inspired by Islam. On “La Yugular,” Rosalía paraphrases a Surah from the Quran: “You who are far / And at the same time, closer than my own jugular vein.” The song is an ode to the eighth-century Iraqi Sufi mystic Rabia Basri, who was said to have been found walking around her city carrying both a torch and a bucket of water. When asked why, she said it was to burn the promises of heaven and put out the fire of hell. For Basri, both the promise of reward and the threat of punishment prevented believers from loving God for God’s own sake. “For you I would destroy the heavens / For you I would demolish hell / No promises, no threats,” Rosalía sings in an Arabic she’s said she’s not sure if she managed to pronounce correctly.
On the bridge, the pop star is at her most mystic. She recites a long, random list of big things that fit in small things, and small things that occupy big things: She fits inside a haiku, but a haiku occupies a country. A golf ball occupies the Titanic, which fits inside a lipstick case. A thorn occupies a continent, a continent doesn’t fill up God, but God fits inside her chest.
Lots of things fit inside Lux: Rosalía’s genre restlessness, her bid for universality via multilingualism, her sense of humor. But the album doesn’t quite fit inside all the discourse that surrounds it, including the religious kind. This unwieldiness makes for exciting pop music and a genuinely interesting effort to explore religion through art.
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