On ‘Lux,’ Rosalia takes a religious odyssey

Lux

Rosalía (Columbia, 2025)

It’s rare to see a pop star of Rosalía’s stature release an unapologetically religious album. It seems to have become a tradition in the pop world that any overtly spiritual themes must somehow be accompanied by a backhand that makes it clear that they’re seeking the divine, but not like those people. It’s up to you whether you find that kind of thing understandable, but I found it refreshingly absent from Lux.

Here, Rosalía is downright earnest, as on “Sauvignon Blanc,” singing to God “Ya no quiero perlas ni caviar / Tu amor será mi capital.” Even if you only speak English, you’ll hear it—the music shifts from orchestral and choral (“Sexo, Violencia, y Llantas”) to flamenco (“La Perla”) to cinematic-with-a-dash-of-reggaeton (“Porcelana”) without missing a beat and always while retaining enormous gravity.

Given Rosalía’s Spanish Catholic upbringing, you might expect that spiritual vision to dominate the album—it’s certainly there, with call-outs to rosaries, relics, and Hildegard of Bingen, to name a few—yet she also finds inspiration in female saints and mystics from traditions all over the world, including Muslim mystic Rabia Basri and Buddhist nun Ryōnen Gensō. The album is similarly universal in its choice of language, mostly sung in Spanish but also in 13 other languages.

If there’s a uniting insight about the divine to be found in Lux, it seems to be in “Dios Es Un Stalker,” in which Rosalía sings from the perspective of God, subtly shadowing her beloved. She sings (in translation), “I don’t like divine intervention / but today I’m going to stalk my baby / and make him fall in love.” As much as we may (or may not) seek God, God is also seeking us. What God will look like when we’re found is anybody’s guess.