Blast “Magnolias” at my funeral.
Rosalía’s fourth studio album, Lux, is here, a pop record that sounds like nothing else released this year. We use that term, too — pop — loosely, as she pulls more from classical music, flamenco, and traditional folk music from Portugal and Italy than any sound or genre one might’ve heard on the radio this year. With 15 songs (after three tracks were inexplicably left off the digital streaming tracklist in the eleventh hour) sung in 13 languages, it’s her most towering creation yet: a four-movement epic inspired by the often tragic and vengeful stories of female saints, martyrs, and religious figures throughout history and told with all the drama, flair, and heart-rendering emotion of an Italian opera. It’s a resounding triumph, a capstone in a career built on breaking expectations.
With something of such monumental scope it’s pointless to debate which songs are the best (each plays a role in Rosalía’s unfolding soap opera). But, upon first listen, there were tracks that stood out among the rest, songs that felt either exceptional in scope, composition, production, or Rosalía’s sheer, raw vocal performance. Below, we broke down those moments and shared how they impacted our listening experience.
“Reliquia”
When Rosalía announced a features list that included artists like Björk and Yves Tumor, perhaps many assumed the album would have a more experimental, electronic bent. In fact, most of Lux is built on strings, handclaps, and organic sound, except “Reliquia,” the one track whose classical soundscape encroaches into digital territory. It starts off normally enough, a breeze of strings and piano that accompany Rosalía singing about the bits of herself she’s picked up and left behind around the world – her eyes in Rome, her heels in Milan, her smile in the U.K. As the song builds, synths creep in, as does a thin filter of distortion until the song climaxes into an exhilarating, brilliant mass that sounds like facing a subwoofer at max volume probably.
There are several sublime, Mt. Everest-height peaks of sound on Lux, but I’m always drawn back to the one on “Reliquia,” a song that feels like it’s about an innocence as much as it is about belonging not to yourself but to the world and others. That sense of freedom is matched by the track’s hair-raising sensation.
“Mio Christo Piange Diamanti”
Sung entirely in Italian, “Mio Christo Piange Diamanti,” or “My God Cries Diamonds,” is the closest the world has gotten to receiving an operatic aria as a pop song. It sounds sophisticated, expensive, its strings gilded in gold, her somersaulting voice conjuring visions of baroque balconies and multitiered gowns. At the end her voice flings itself into the heavens, shattering a crystal wine glass if I had one, while her orchestral choir erupts around her. It really shouldn’t work in pop album context, but it does because Rosalía’s execution feels studied and maybe not mastered, but mastered enough to unpracticed ears. Its boldness of a swerve also deserves admiration, akin to witnessing her fitting a square peg into a round hole.
“La Perla”
The weighty religiosity and sacrosanct aura of Lux makes it feel like tales from some ancient text about some long-wiped village in some part of the world. In that context, “La Perla,” is that small town’s gossip board, a message nailed to a pole by a scorned woman addressing her womanizing, emotionally abusive, gaslighting husband displayed for the whole town to see.
Rosalía has spent her entire press campaign pushing a narrative about how the album is inspired by the stories of female saints — which it most certainly is — but “La Perla” is where the cracks in that story begin to reveal itself. This mid-album lighter might be Rosalía’s most transparent song about the demise of her relationship with ex-fiancé Rauw Alejandro (and what exactly went down between the two). And what a time she has recounting it, draping a cheery, jaunty, folk melody over withering insults about his manhood (or lack thereof): “The local disappointment, national heartbreaker/ An emotional terrorist, the greatest disaster in the world/ He’s a pearl, no one trusts him/ He’s a pearl, one to be very careful with.” If it were actually 200 B.C., it would be enough to send someone into life-ending exile.
“La Rumba Del Perdón”
IDC, Rosalía is in her top form when she’s in her flamenco bag like on “La Ruma Del Perdón,” not the flashiest song on Lux, but one that perhaps most directly inserts her into the lineage of Spain’s national art form. She sings alongside Spain’s Estrella Morente, who helped introduce flamenco music to a new generation of listeners with her debut album Mi Cante y Una Poema (My Songs and a Poem).
Together, they tell a story about a man who enacts a major betrayal involving stolen kilos and an abandoned son, which Rosalía forgives him for on the chorus. But it’s third act of the song where the tale becomes almost mystical, a spell, a greater truth of the world that it seems Rosalía and Morente are imparting on us though I haven’t figured it out about what exactly, yet. “When you have lied just to lie or lied for your truth/ When you have loved more than God meant to give you/ To tie and untie, to undress and be undressed.” It’s worth every close read and additional listen to break it apart.
“Magnolias”
Rosalía knows how to write a showstopper. El Mal Querer closed on “A Ningún Hombre,” an Auto-Tune-laced ballad about a woman grasping onto the last bits of her resilience to move on without her man. It’s noble, tragic, utterly gorgeous. The same descriptors could be used for Lux‘s finale, “Magnolias,” even though its narrator suffers a much different end: death.
“Magnolias” is a funeral song, a delicate requiem. But it’s also a beginning, a moment of finally meeting God who meets Rosalía in the middle of her path to heaven. She sings about seeing her friends and haters cry at her funeral and asks them to shower her with magnolias, the creamy white flower that symbolizes purity and femininity. A tone of gratitude runs parallel alongside the sorrow of her death. It’s a delicate balancing act of emotions — religious awe, joy, and anguish — that Rosalía nails with the waver of her voice. For an album emotionally exploring the spiritual of extremes life, “Magnolias” matches that scope in death, a flower that’s worthy to be thrown at Rosalía’s feet as the curtain falls.