Heaven made

With a towering new album about female saints in 13 languages, Rosalía is pop's boldest star-and one of its most controversial

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ROSALÍA VILA TOBELLA is just as bored as you are of pop music functioning as gossip column fodder, with lyrics full of hints of rivalries and betrayal. "I'm tiring of seeing people referencing celebrities, and celebrities referencing other celebrities," she says. "I'm really much more excited about saints." The 33-year-old Catalan musician and producer's monumental fourth album, Lux, draws on the lives of dozens of female saints, inspired by "feminine mysticism, spirituality" and how lives of murder, materialism and rebellion could light the way to canonisation. Her gothic, operatic new single Berghain borrows from the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen. "She had these visions that would pierce her brain. There's also Vimala, who wrote poetry but was a prostitute, and she ended up becoming a saint because she was one of the first women who wrote in the Therīgāthā," an ancient Buddhist poem collection written by nuns.

Santa Olga de Kyiv, who lived in the 10th century, was a Protestant, Rosalía continues. "She was considered a saint because she brought so many people to that religion. But she was an assassin - when her husband was killed, she, out of revenge, killed a lot of men. It's crazy that person can become a saint. In different religions, contexts, cultures, sainthood is understood so differently." Rosalía makes a great case for an alternative career as a lecturer; if she wasn't a pop star, she says, she "would be in college trying to study theology or philosophy". (Her breakout album, 2018's El Mal Querer, was her flamenco degree thesis.) Meeting in a London hotel room, she speaks softly, reverently, with precision, her assistant nearby to help with translation, though she barely needs it. You do need her guidance to follow the traces of these saints in Lux, which may more obviously be interpreted as a fearsome confrontation of ex-lovers and critical detractors.