Rosalía’s Lux is more than just epic Catholic pop – it grapples with a world full of complexities and crises | Carlos Delclos

I I went to Luxe prepared to not like it. Not because I doubt Rosalía’s consummate talents or intense intellectual curiosity, but because the album’s promotional campaign has already caused too much work on my nerves. The launch was brutal: thirsty reels teasing the album on social media, mystics presenting the fashion, even bringing Madrid city center to a standstill — everything about it seemed designed to send the message that this was less a collection of songs than a global event demanding reverence.

Over the past decade, Rosalía has become Spain’s biggest pop export, and Lux ​​appears to be inaugurating her own imperial phase. The album debuted at No. 1 in five countries, was voted The Guardian’s best album of the year, broke streaming records on Spotify, and reached No. 4 on the US and UK charts, where non-English-speaking pop music rarely thrives. Multilingual and stylistically expansive, Lux is infused with Catholic iconography, with lyrics in no less than 13 languages, and revolving around themes of transcendence, suffering and grace.

None of this is unprecedented in pop music, but the album’s air of luxury, and its framing of spiritual transcendence as a privileged experience, doesn’t fit well with a cost-of-living crisis, especially when the Vatican has been unusually direct lately in its criticism of inequality, economic excesses, and moral excuses for wealth.

“Why is she doing basic nun now?I grumbled as I watched Rosalía ironing her clothes in the video for Berghain’s first single, surrounded by a majestic choir and orchestra. A revival of (obviously white) Catholic nationalist aesthetics seems like the last thing the world needs, especially when it’s being washed away by someone as accessible as Rosalía. Her rise has made her a one-woman soft power campaigner for Spanish culture, the undisputed master of Spanish culture. La marca españa (Brand Spain is a government initiative) on the global popular scene.

However, once I spent time on the record, and the PR fog began to clear, it became clear that Lux was doing something far more interesting and disturbing than stately church pop. Beneath the bombast and heavy symbolism lies not a sermon, but an inquiry into what it means to live in a world of disintegrating assumptions.

Today, crisis is no longer just a momentary moment of exception, but a comprehensive condition – a point underscored in 2022 when Collins Dictionary named “Permacrisis” its word of the year. Everyday life is imbued with moral urgency, and our values ​​are constantly “under threat.” Cataloging epidemics – genocide, war, climate breakdown, inflation, displacement – ​​now looks less like diagnosis and more like tagging content for the almighty algorithm. It is precisely this convergence between uncertainty and morality that sociologist Ronald Inglehart has studied for decades. He argued that existential insecurity pushes societies toward tyranny: to adhere to traditional power hierarchies, moral rigidity, religious sanctity, and patriarchal social order.

Spain is no exception. Over the past decade, a constellation of ultra-conservative actors has moved from the margins to the center of public life, largely through digital tools. These groups act as “moral entrepreneurs”: politically savvy and highly mobilized, they portray themselves as beleaguered defenders of life, order, and truth against a hostile secular world. When I first uploaded Berghain’s video of Rosalía to YouTube, it was a pre-roll ad from the Spanish bishops’ conference, titled You Too Can Be a Saint — quietly asserting that sainthood, too, is now being handed out algorithmically.

These forces feed from Spain’s cycle of anger represented by high-level corruption scandals and judicial politicization. The buzzword here lately (as elsewhere) is “polarization,” but the popular history behind it is that of civil war between the two countries. Las Dos Spain (Spanish): red versus black, Nacionales against RepublicansCain vs. Abel. However, Rosalía wants to lift her gaze from this dualistic view of the world and study the whole with all its contradictions.

Lux begins not with a declaration, but with a desire: to live between the two (“How to live in your home“), the love of God and the pleasures of pleasure on earth. It’s far from a coincidence. Rosalía must be one of the very few international pop stars who conscientiously does scholarly research before writing songs: in fact, her breakthrough 2018 album El Mal Querer doubled as her thesis at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya, earning her academic honors. That idea carries over to Lux. Each song doubles as an archive of female mystics, drawing on figures such as Saint Teresa of Avila, Rabiya al-Adawiya, Sun Boer, or Hildegard von Bingen—women for whom devotion, power, eroticism, and transcendence were never inseparable.

Lux is exhilarating in her refusal to settle. Reliquia, the album’s second track, dynamically twists strings and vocal snippets into unrecognizable shapes before exploding into ecstatic rhythms. When Rosalia singsThere is no Santa or soy, but that’s how it is Congrats!(“I am no saint, but I am blessed”), the line ends with a deliberate sound of heretical subversion: deification without ascension. This is one of the “abominable heresies” for which the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza was excommunicated from both Judaism and Catholicism. Writing in the long shadow of the Inquisition that shaped his family’s forced conversion and banishment, he suggested that God and nature are one and the same: that there is no hierarchy, no outside, only One “substance” differentiates infinitely.

At his most persuasive, Lux presents his dense religious themes on an extreme sonic palette, where the sacred is not opposed to the profane, but crowded with it. In Divinize, Rosalia finds liberation not through escaping the body but through deeper entanglement within it. In Porcellana, fragility, fear and ferocity create a constantly evolving tension. “Ego is the sum of nothing/Ego total lux mundi(“I’m nothing/I’m the light of the world”) she sings in Latin, punctuated by soft flamenco claps — an alchemy as powerful as anything I’ve heard this year.

These are the moments when Lux comes into focus, when easy binaries are gradually dismantled to reveal a multiplicity: not two opposing forces at opposite ends of the spectrum, but a myriad of forces coexisting in constant tension. This is evident in the album’s sprawling liner notes and production credits, where Rosalía’s unique talents are pushed forward through careful collaboration.

It’s not a perfect album: the more conventional compositions sometimes veer into excess or banality, and its avoidance of politics can seem less principled than aloof – at a time when reactionary and oppressive projects are no longer marginal but have direct access to power. However, Lux points toward something more demanding than a simple solution: in the album’s signature chorus, La Yugular, all-encompassing love swells until it cancels out heaven and hell alike. The song ends with Rosalia’s scale collapsing again and again (“The entire galaxy fits a drop of saliva”), revealing the self as a site of immensity and pressure, where the strain of containing crowds within a single body carries its own spiritual charge.