Chamber Pop

Rosalía's latest album is a stunning left turn.

- MUSIC / CRAIG JENKINS

THE PATRON SAINT Rosalia of Palermo was a Sicilian preteen from a well-to-do family in the 1100s who, facing an arranged marriage, renounced her wealth and cloistered herself in a nearby mountain cave to pray for the rest of her life. Catalonia’s premier pop star, Rosalía, invokes her namesake in her new single “Reliquia.” Following a broken engagement to the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Rauw Alejandro in 2023, Rosalía compares her incremental loss of innocence to a crumbling religious figurine losing hands, eyes, and more to time and travel. Her heart, the chorus advises, has never been her own, and her fate is to give endlessly of herself. Is Rosalía singing about desire, fame, or faith? Was this song for Alejandro, for us, or for God?

These wires cross on her stunning fourth album, Lux, whose artwork depicts the 33-year-old singer in a white nun’s habit and a straitjacketish top. The writing dances on a knife-edge as religious piety and saintly delusion converge. The music booms and swells like it was meant to be experienced in a cathedral, tense strings and choral asides replacing the equatorial pop of past hits like 2019’s “Con Altura” and 2022’s “Saoko.” Lux’s lead single, “Berghain,” features lyrics that grasp for the starry-eyed curtness of the Bible’s Song of Solomon—“His love is my love / His blood is my blood”—with a choir singing them in percussive German; the result sounds like the kind of classical work that enjoys a second life on horror-film soundtracks. It’s all several ticks too horny to pass as humdrum Catholic fixation on the agony of the saints. The ideological provocations of Madonna (Ciccone) iconography and the esoteric execution of Björk songs meet in Lux’s palette of fixations.

This is a very sharp left turn, but everything is with Rosalía. Her third album, 2022’s Motomami, is