Rosalía’s thrilling new avant-pop swerve: Singing in 13 languages
- The San Juan Daily Star
- 2 days ago
- 8 min read
By JOE COSCARELLI and JON CARAMANICA
There is no pivot too sharp for Rosalía, the pathbreaking Spanish pop star. She emerged a decade ago as a disruptive star student of flamenco, and has since become pop’s leading avant-gardist and one of its most convincing omnivores.
Last Friday, she released “Lux,” her fourth full-length album. In the way that her radical pop breakout, “El Mal Querer,” was an implicit retort to the formal wrestling of her debut, “Los Angeles,” and the sensuous industrial churn of her third album, “Motomami,” was a retort to “El Mal Querer,” “Lux” — an album shocking in its formal audacity and its playfulness — is a retort to all of those things. Or perhaps, an elevation above them.
“Lux” is an album about the feminine divine, faith and the brutalities of love, and features lyrics sung in 13 languages: Rosalía’s native Spanish, but also Catalan, English, Latin, Sicilian, Ukrainian, Arabic, German and more. She spent more than two years working on the music, much of it devoted to learning to write and sing convincingly in other tongues.
“It’s a lot of trying to understand how other languages work,” Rosalía, 33, said in an interview, conducted in English with a sprinkling of Spanglish, on Popcast, The New York Times’ music show. “It’s a lot of intuition and trying to be like, I’m going to just write and let’s see how these will sound in another language.” She spent loads of time on Google translate, then speaking with professional translators — “If I rhyme this with this, does this make sense?” — and teachers who coached her on the fine points of phonetics.
Ultimately, she was able to deliver her songs with practiced mastery, without any artificial intelligence trickery: “It’s all human — very much human,” she said.
The resulting album is “like a puzzle, like a labyrinth,” based as much in operatic and classical traditions as in pop. The London Symphony Orchestra appears throughout, in arrangements by Pulitzer Prize winner and former Kanye West collaborator Caroline Shaw and others. The sound — produced by Rosalía, along with Noah Goldstein (“Yeezus”) and Dylan Wiggins (SZA, Justin Bieber) — is roaring and jagged, and in some places ethereal, as if stomping down on history, her enemies, and in turn, her old public self.
Much as Rosalía studied flamenco at university to master it and then bend it to her will, she undertook this study as an act of cross-cultural faithfulness, but also as a confident statement of artistic authority and hunger.
“It’s because of the love and curiosity — wanting to understand better the other,” she said. “You know, Simone Weil, she says, love is to love the distance between ourselves and the loved object. And I think it’s true: Through understanding the other, maybe you can understand yourself better, and you can learn how to love better.”
These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
JON CARAMANICA: Each of your projects feels like a full palate cleanse from the one prior. Is there any fear associated with the blank canvas?
ROSALÍA: A white canvas is like looking into an abyss. I start sweating — like, cold sweat, in front of that. But at the same time, there’s something that even makes me feel more uncomfortable, which would be to stay still.
CARAMANICA: Does any of it come from rejecting what came before?
ROSALÍA: That’s it, 100%. Everything is in constant movement, right? I’m always in constant change. Why, then, shouldn’t my sound change with me?
JOE COSCARELLI: And it’s not only a rejection of your own prior work, but it seems to be you looking at the pop landscape and saying, implicitly or explicitly, we’re not doing enough.
ROSALÍA: I don’t look to the outside that much, but more like, what am I not doing? What have I not done yet? What do I need to do? And I think that my favorite artists, maybe, are the ones who don’t give you what you want, but what you need.
At the end of the day, making albums for me is like excuses to do what I actually want to be doing. In this case, I wanted to just read more.
COSCARELLI: What were you reading?
ROSALÍA: Hagiografias, so many hagiografias. Simone Weil, Chris Kraus. These nuns, they were amazing poets, great artists — Hildegard of Bingen — she was like a polímata [polymath], right? She was able to create in so many ways. There’s so many amazing women in history that we don’t listen to enough, we don’t talk about enough.
I just try to be a musician the best way I can and push in experimentation. If that’s literally staying at home, just writing lyrics for a year — or waking up early, sleeping barely nothing to go to the studio and stay for 14 hours working on mixes and not even having them ever perfect enough — that’s what it is to me. I think it is a job at the end of the day.
CARAMANICA: Your prior two albums have been trying to reconcile coming from a robust cultural tradition but wanting to break those rules, getting a lot of acclaim and then saying, What do I do with this added attention and responsibility and success? Those felt outward-reaching but this feels different, more internal.
ROSALÍA: The other day, I was thinking I made an album from a very different place than I’ve ever done before.
I was hearing this man, he was saying that there’s two different types of confidence, the one that is based on the belief that you’re going to have success — como por mis cojones, we say, right? So you’re kind of like pushing whatever you have to do.
There’s another confidence, which maybe is the lack of fear of failure. I think there’s surrender in this approach. I think it’s the first time that I allowed myself to make an album from this place. Complete surrender — this is what I actually needed to say and sing about and do.
COSCARELLI: Björk appears as a vocalist on “Lux.” How did your relationship with her develop?
ROSALÍA: She is my favorite woman and artist. I think we met through Pablo, El Guincho [Rosalía’s former producing partner]. We went to have some tapas in Barcelona. And I thought that she was the most fascinating human I’ve ever met because her train of thought was so different than I’ve ever seen before. It was just an instant crush of admiration.
We stayed in touch and I just felt like with this album, if this was such a strong, demanding musical exercise, if I was doing it good enough, maybe, I would send it to her, and if it was in the right level, maybe then she couldn’t say no.
COSCARELLI: There was some masculine energy in “Motomami,” which focused on more Caribbean music like reggaeton. Do you think of “Lux” as a distinctly feminine project?
ROSALÍA: The main inspiration is feminine mystique, so then for sure there’s more feminine energy. And also the idea of, ser un receptaculo — being a vessel. I was reading the other day, this woman, Ursula [K. Le Guin] says that maybe the first cultural device in history was not a weapon — it was not something sharp to kill something. Maybe it was a vessel, something where you can gather things? And so she was saying that there’s a difference between masculine writing and feminine writing: Masculine writing is about the hero, the triumphs of this hero. And if the hero is not in the story, then it’s not a good story. It’s all about the conflict in the narrative.
Feminine writing, it’s more about an ongoing process. It’s not about the climax and then the resolution. It’s about maybe a person with delusions and transformations and all the things that this person has to lose. It’s not about me, me, I, I.
COSCARELLI: This album is grand, there are strings everywhere, highly arranged. It’s operatic.
CARAMANICA: Thundering.
ROSALÍA: It has this intention of verticality. Some of our projects felt a little bit more horizontal. A more mundane type of energy.
CARAMANICA: When you say vertical, you mean between the material realm and something more astral and spiritual?
ROSALÍA: Yes. I think that I’ve always had a desire of, how can I get close to God? How can I be closer to God? That spiritual feeling has always been there, it’s just that I haven’t rationalized it or intellectualized it.
COSCARELLI: Is there something almost mischievous about the way you tackle language on this album? People have long waited for you to cross over and sing in English. At the same time, you’ve been called a cultural appropriator for taking from cultures that aren’t yours and capitalizing on it. Is this a rebellious response to that criticism?
ROSALÍA: I’m rebellious in general, OK? Let’s say that, for sure, I’m rebellious. But I think it’s more about I belong to the world. That’s how I feel — yo no soy tan mía como del mundo.
I love traveling, I love learning from other humans. Why would I not try to learn another language and try to sing in another language and expand the way I can be a singer or a musician or an artist? The world is so connected.
CARAMANICA: I imagine that got quite expensive over time. How much over budget did you spend?
ROSALÍA: You guys, I’m just going to say that we are so out of budget. That’s all I’m going to say. I’m at peace that the vision is there. But my team might be not so at peace.
COSCARELLI: How do you get away with that?
ROSALÍA: I just want to do whatever I’m feeling like doing in each moment. Everybody who knows me knows that. That’s all I care about: Just the freedom!
COSCARELLI: I have a theory that because you are a pop star in public and in presentation, you are allowed even more freedom in your music. You are good at playing the celeb game: You’re in a Calvin Klein commercial, the “WAP” video, hanging with the Kardashians.
Do you consciously play the game in extra-musical arenas in order to hoard cachet in the studio?
ROSALÍA: It’s all, to me, about fun. So I’m presented the possibility of being in the “WAP” video? Let’s go! My sister, she says — and I don’t know if I agree — that my music is not pop. But she says I am.
I disagree. Because I want to think that my music is pop. It’s just another way of making pop. There has to exist another way of making it pop! Björk proved it. Kate Bush proved it. And I need to think that what I’m doing is pop, because otherwise I don’t think then that I am succeeding. What I want to do is make music that hopefully a lot of people can enjoy. That’s my design
CARAMANICA: “Lux” is as pop as “Motomami” to you.
ROSALÍA: 100%. It’s just different codes.
COSCARELLI: Your average listener, even if they’re a Spanish speaker, will not be picking up every word. Are you asking a lot of your audience to absorb a work like this?
ROSALÍA: Absolutely, I am. The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite. That’s what I’m craving. Sometimes I’m able to make the exercise of just shutting everything down and watching a movie in a dark space in my room.
COSCARELLI: Even that can be hard without looking at your phone.
ROSALÍA: It’s so hard. But that’s why I’m like, there has to be something that pulls us there. I don’t know if this is going to be that, but at least there’s the desire of being something that pulls you to be focused for hopefully an hour where you’re just there. You’re just here. I know it’s a lot to ask, but that’s what I want.