Premature Evaluation: Rosalía LUX

LUX — the fourth studio album from brazen pop star Rosalía — is a spiritual opera that dares to see how many more genres, doors, realms the Spanish auteur can break through. From its outset, she is caught somewhere between life and death. In the overture “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas,” she imagines an existence ascending to heaven and then back to earth. “How nice it’d be to live between them both/ First I’ll love the world then I’ll love God,” the Spanish pop star sings, her spiritual dreams fortified by a magnolious choir. With piano trickles that fall like teardrops and somber strings, we’re already miles away from (or in this case above) the skid-marked revelry of 2022’s MOTOMAMI. On that album’s closer “Sakura,” she compared the glamorous lifestyle to the fleeting life of the Japanese flower: “Being a pop star never lasts.” Over shrieks of fans, her live vocal delivery presented a chilling parable that she was reaching for more than swerving around fame’s potholes. LUX does more than take Rosalía to transcendent new heights. If MOTOMAMI was the sound of a pop star rejecting calcified fame, LUX is that star diffusing into myth.