Hundreds of bodies crowd into the dimly lit space, smoke and mist dancing through the artificial light that emanates from the stage. Their eyes are watching her at the center of it all like some sonic saint—her martyrdom is musical, and she reigns over the crowd from a reliquary box of white and pale blue fabric. With her face turned away from the listening party audience, she is like a self-contained image of the sublime.
With her latest album “Lux,” released on Friday, Nov. 7, Rosalía subverts the story in Genesis and invents a contemporary Tower of Babel. Rock drums, intricate orchestral and choral arrangements and acoustic guitar replace crude mud bricks. Rosalía’s voice—oscillating between operatic and contemporary—elevates the crowd of onlookers beyond the “7th Heaven,” or the eighth or even the 1000th. This Tower of Babel ambitiously reaches for a paradise where language barriers are broken and music is the lingua franca of lost love and loneliness.
Following up her 2022 alternative reggaeton album “Motomami,” Rosalía’s “Lux” deals in a continuation of the same topics: heartbreak, mortality and the divine feminine. At the recent New York City listening party christening the album, the phrases “When was the last time you were in complete darkness?” and “Sometimes being in complete darkness is the best way to find the light” were projected on a dark screen behind the singer’s stage, which was draped in rumpled fabrics to evoke the image of a massive bed.
As its title suggests, “Lux”—meaning “light” in Latin—intends to guide its listeners through this proverbial darkness and toward the light. In Rosalía’s own words: “Artists aren’t giving you what you want, they’re giving you what you need.” They are giving you the world. But how does one artist shed light on the world, especially with the limitations of language scattering and obscuring her message like the disenfranchised citizens of the fallen city of Babel?
Evidently, when one language is not enough to express the wide breadth of emotions a human being is capable of feeling, you use 14 instead.
“Lux,” unlike “Motomami,” not only features lyrics in Rosalía’s native languages of Catalan and Spanish but also includes lines in Arabic, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian and Ukrainian. This blending of languages is not just some impressive gimmick, however: It is an artful exploration of the quasi-divine pain every human is capable of experiencing. Fittingly, each language reflects a similarly ubiquitous concept: female martyrdom.
“No, no, no soy una santa, pero estoy blessed,” sings Rosalía in Spanish on track two, “Reliquia.” She claims that, although she herself is not a saint, she is still blessed and imbued with mystic feminine power. She, like the listeners of “Lux,” shares the same emotions as any canonized martyr suffering for their love. Rosalía abandons her vanity and offers herself up as a relic—“Soy tu reliquia”—to the “playboys” and “emotional terrorists” who have hurt her, speaking in the same language as the Peruvian saint whose self-sacrifice she emulates. Like Saint Rosalía of Lima, who self-flagellated and isolated herself for her Christian devotion, Rosalía and countless heartbroken people around the world tear themselves down for the sake of pleasing another.
Echoing a similar sentiment in Spanish, Latin, English and Japanese on track four, “Porcelana,” she says, “Ego sum nihil, ego sum lux mundi,” or, in English, “I am nothing, I am the light of the world.” In Japanese, she sings, “I’ll throw away my beauty before you have the chance to ruin it,” echoing the story of the Buddhist nun Ryōnen Gensō, who disfigured her face in search of spiritual truth. Rosalía flips the script, using Gensō as an allegory for preemptively making oneself feel unworthy or ugly before heartbreak has the chance to do the same. In “Porcelana,” Gensō’s ecstasy and suffering clash to create a poignant and paradoxical image of self-actualization.
This painful devotion takes on cosmic proportions in track 11, “La Yugular,” when, in Arabic, she asserts that she would “destroy the sky” and “tear down hell” for love—the same kind of celestial passion first defined in Sufi mystic and poet Rabia Basri’s “Ishq” or “Doctrine of Divine Love.”
Each track then becomes a hagiography—a biography of a saint or mystic’s life—reflecting the multicultural nature of martyrdom and breaking the language barrier of pain. Like Joan of Arc, Olga of Kyiv or Teresa of Avila, Rosalía is willing to risk it all for the sake of love. Whether this affection is for the divine or for an “ain’t-shit” dude is null and void. The distinction between the two is blurred to create a universal message of unrequited or toxic love—the kind that leaves you broken in the dark.
As both “nothing” and the “light of the world,” Rosalía tells the many stories of sainted women from around the globe in their native tongues to prove that her own heartbreak and darkness can be a unifying fire that transcends language. As “Lux” fades into silence, what lingers in that space is not confusion but communion. The Tower of Babel, in this case, stands not as a testament to human arrogance but to our intrinsic need to be understood and loved.
Where the old Babel scattered humanity into disenfranchised chaos, Rosalía gathers the languages of a broken people and layers Catalan atop Japanese, Latin over Arabic, until language dissolves into just feeling. Because that is all that language is, is it not? Feeling. She not only rebuilds Babel to reach God, but so that we might reach each other.
Through “Lux,” heartbreak becomes architecture, and Rosalía’s voice lights the way to heaven as the lingua franca of the brokenhearted.