International Desk, November 7 (EFE)
A dazzling reinvention. That’s the summary of international reviews for ‘Lux’, Rosalía’s new album, released this Friday and praised by media outlets such as Rolling Stone magazine, the BBC, The Guardian, and Variety.
After months of speculation and weeks of an unusual promotional campaign punctuated by alleged leaks, the Catalan singer’s fourth studio album was officially released today, and favorable reviews were quick to follow.
Rolling Stone magazine calls the album “dazzling,” giving it five stars, while The Independent highlights its constant evolution in sound to build “a truly spectacular and ambitious work.”
It is precisely this ambition that all critics agree on, praising Rosalía’s courage to break with all her previous work and embark on a “spiritual odyssey” with which the singer reinvents herself, as Variety points out.
“It’s a journey as formidable to undertake as it is to assimilate, and that challenge is the very essence of the project. Far from contemporary pop, every note and lyric demands full attention, and the reward is transcendence, even when the material invites you to take notes like a philosophy student with a marker in hand,” he adds.
From the cover, dressed as a nun, the artist makes her intentions clear with a mystical and intense work, full of melodramatic pianos or violins and in which there are echoes of Holy Week and flamenco clapping, ecclesiastical choirs, ballad, Italian song, Portuguese influence, Mexican touches and Arabic-influenced strings.
A “radical and fascinating” album for the BBC, which is already wondering if ‘Lux’ is the best album of the year.
“Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and featuring multiple arrangements by Pulitzer Prize winner Caroline Shaw, it is a radical and rebellious operatic work unlike anything else in the pop realm,” explains the British channel.
Meanwhile, The Guardian, which also awards it five stars, considers it “a demanding and singular fusion of classic and chaotic that no one else could have achieved.”
And the French magazine Les Inrockuptibles says that Rosalía “transcends pop in a grandiose and unique album” and that it is “liturgical in the form of a gesture of emancipation and of astonishing power, dedicated to the figures of the saints whose hagiographies inspired it.”
Religious misunderstandings
An album full of religious connotations that, according to musicologist and psychologist Daniel Gómez Sánchez, the first to present a doctoral thesis in Spain on Rosalía’s creative process, have been misunderstood.
For him, the notion of God that Rosalía explores in ‘Lux’ is not that of “Catholic dogma.” “Among the saints who inspire her creation are Muslim women, elements of Taoism… Rosalía is spiritual, but not pro-church,” he explained to EFE.
Regarding the accusations of sacrilege against ‘Berghain’ for the insistent final verses – ‘I’ll fuck you till you love me’ – it is a phrase he took from Mike Tyson “and it is what he puts in the mouth of the devil when he sees that he cannot capture Rosalía’s soul.”
“But her intention is not to caricature or be disrespectful, but to reinterpret this work from the present, as she did with ‘Romanza flamenca’ in ‘El mal querer’,” she opined.
A visionary, in Madonna’s opinion
But above all, the clearest summary is the one Madonna made two days ago, when she was one of the privileged few who had been able to listen to Rosalía’s new work before its official release.
“Thank you @Rosalia. I can’t stop listening! You are a true visionary!!!” (Thank you Rosalía. I can’t stop listening to it! You are a true visionary!!!)), the ‘queen of pop’ told him on Instagram in a message accompanied by three white hearts.
Unanimous praise from specialists for an album that now has to pass the acid test of listens, the data of which will begin to be known 24 hours after the release.
Currently, their first single, ‘Berghain’, released on October 27, is in 28th place globally on Spotify and in third place in Spain.
And it’s in second position in YouTube’s video trends, only behind the session by Daddy Yankee and Bizarrap.
