Rosal\u00eda 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. \u201cI\u2019m tiring of seeing people referencing celebrities, and celebrities referencing other celebrities,\u201d she says. \u201cI\u2019m really much more excited about saints.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 33-year-old Catalan musician and producer\u2019s monumental fourth album, Lux, draws on the lives of dozens of female saints, inspired by \u201cfeminine mysticism, spirituality\u201d and how lives of murder, materialism and rebellion could light the way to canonisation. Rosal\u00eda reels them off. Her gothic, operatic new single Berghain borrows from the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (cited like Madonna<\/a> these days by experimental female musicians). \u201cShe had these visions that would pierce her brain. There\u2019s 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 Ther\u012bg\u0101th\u0101,\u201d an ancient Buddhist poem collection written by nuns.<\/p>\n Santa Olga de Kyiv, who lived in the 10th century, was a Protestant, Rosal\u00eda continues. \u201cShe was considered a saint because she brought so many people to that religion. But she was an assassin \u2013 when her husband was killed, she, out of revenge, killed a lot of men. It\u2019s crazy that person can become a saint. In different religions, contexts, cultures, sainthood is understood so differently.\u201d<\/p>\n Rosal\u00eda makes a great case for an alternative career as a lecturer; if she wasn\u2019t a pop star, she says, she \u201cwould be in college trying to study theology or philosophy\u201d. (Her breakout album, 2018\u2019s El Mal Querer, was her flamenco degree thesis \u2013 probably the first time anyone\u2019s received academic honours and Pitchfork\u2019s best new music accolade for one project.) Meeting in a central London hotel room in mid-October, she looks quite saintly, with her waist-length dark hair, the faintest shimmer of makeup and a pale grey long-sleeved jersey dress: quiet luxury via the convent. 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.<\/p>\n Lux is 18 tracks long, features lyrics in 13 languages, two choirs, Patti Smith reading a poem, Bj\u00f6rk and the London Symphony Orchestra, and takes further inspiration from the Ukraine-born Brazilian novelist Clarice Lispector and the French philosopher Simone Weil. It\u2019s an exhilarating, towering listen, and leaves behind the South American club sounds of 2022\u2019s aggressively playful Motomami to centre Rosal\u00eda\u2019s classical flamenco training: the former scholar twisted the tradition through avant garde electronic production on her first two albums, 2017\u2019s Los \u00c1ngeles and El Mal Querer. Everything she\u2019s done has prompted accusations of cultural appropriation \u2013 flamenco being the province of Andalusian Gypsies, reggaeton and dembow as Latin American and Caribbean traditions. The culturally voracious Lux also feels like a provocation, underscored by Rosal\u00eda\u2019s mastery of its many disciplines: a monomaniacal flex at critics and pretenders by a virtuoso who can rap menacingly in Latin and execute flawless pop iconography. The week after we meet, she gets a halo dyed into her hair<\/a>.<\/p>\n When writing, Rosal\u00eda had a world map on her wall with pins marking the stories of each saint she discovered. \u201cIt was like a huge puzzle,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s so much more that I couldn\u2019t fit in. My love is plural and infinite, and it\u2019s about trying to fit as much as I can so everybody could feel welcome when they hear this album.\u201d Some listeners may question exactly what statement she\u2019s making by singing in Hebrew and Arabic; her PR instructs me not to ask about politics, and Rosal\u00eda explains that those passages simply reference the Sufi mystic Rabia and the prophet Miriam.<\/p>\n \u2018It\u2019s the most fulfilling when you can stop being yourself \u2026\u2019 Rosal\u00eda. Photograph: Noah P Dillon<\/p>\n Being a performer, she says, is about \u201cbeing able to be a channel, a vessel. It\u2019s the most fulfilling when you can stop being yourself. When I see artists like Nick Cave seem to embody otherness, I really admire that. Nowadays, more than ever, I feel like it\u2019s necessary to understand the other. In a world that sometimes feels so divided, for me it\u2019s about collecting stories and making songs out of that the best I can, because it\u2019s the love for the other that allows me to do an album like this.\u201d<\/p>\n What also allowed Rosal\u00eda to make an album like this is her unique status. No matter what her critics make of her globe-straddling approach, the exacting study she puts into it, and the supreme execution, are irreproachable. \u201cI always try to find ways to keep learning,\u201d she says. Although she\u2019s learning French and German on Duolingo, she spent a year working with native speakers to get the Lux translations right, including Charlotte Gainsbourg and Justice for the French parts; she also took piano lessons for the first time since she stopped tuition at 16. Equally irreproachable is her pop cultural nous: filming a role for season three of HBO\u2019s Euphoria, modelling for Calvin Klein, being papped taking a bouquet of cigarettes<\/a> to Charli xcx\u2019s birthday party. On stage on the bravura Motomami tour<\/a> \u2013 probably the decade\u2019s best \u2013 Rosal\u00eda always had an invasive cameraman on her trail, a comment on voyeurism amplified by the portrait-mode big screens, themselves a sharp reflection on how phones shape our perspective. Rosal\u00eda has mastered the sort of celebrity that buys you three years to make an album about God, transcendence and absolution, blowing the budget several times over.<\/p>\n Rosal\u00eda \u2013 Berghain feat Bj\u00f6rk & Yves Tumor<\/p>\n She estimates that she produced 97% of Lux alone. \u201cIt probably is the most demanding album I\u2019ve ever tried to do,\u201d she says. She made it in Los Angeles, far from her family and home in Barcelona: \u201cThe solitude, the isolation, it\u2019s pretty hard to deal with.\u201d But her work requires that kind of asceticism. \u201cI consider myself pretty social, but to do something like this, there\u2019s no other way \u2013 it takes a lot of simplifying the day, doing barely nothing but this.\u201d To write, she has to lie in bed. \u201cIt comes much easier when you let it come to you and make the space to try to erase yourself and disappear.\u201d<\/p>\n Much as Rosal\u00eda would rather disappear into the heady Lux, all the beatification stuff evidently shrouds a classic breakup album. I am also told not to ask about relationships: in 2023, Rosal\u00eda and Puerto Rican reggaeton star Rauw Alejandro ended their engagement, months after releasing a loved-up joint EP. On Rosal\u00eda\u2019s rhapsodic new song La Perla, she indicts \u201cun terrorista emocional\u201d. \u201cMejor hablar \/ Ahora que \/ Callarme para siempre,\u201d [\u201cI\u2019d rather speak now than forever hold my peace\u201d] she sings on Focu \u2018Ranni \u2013 a likely callback to El Mal Querer\u2019s Que No Salga la Luna, sung as the abusive groom of the 13th-century Occitan text Flamenca that inspired the album: \u201cSi hay alguien que aqu\u00ed se oponga \/ Que no levante la vo\u2019\u201d (\u201cif someone objects, may they not raise their voice\u201d). Another saint she cites, la santuzza Rosalia, called off her wedding the day before the planned ceremony to live as a hermit.<\/p>\n This may be one experience that attracted Rosal\u00eda to the stories of women who transcended their circumstances \u2013 though she\u2019s not about to bring it up. A master of saying exactly what she wants and nothing more, she demurs when asked if searching for spiritual guidance inspired Lux: \u201cDefinitely, like all humans.\u201d After a moment of silence that we try to psych each other into filling, she shares examples from her past.<\/p>\n Rosal\u00eda\u2019s Motomami world tour in Santiago, Chile, 2022. Photograph: Alberto Vald\u00e9s\/EPA<\/p>\n Aged 16, she had vocal cord surgery to fix damage from her enthusiastic, untutored singing. \u201cI couldn\u2019t speak for a month \u2013 that was very strange, like this fasting of speaking, and then a year of vocal rehabilitation,\u201d she says. \u201cIt took me so many years to really feel like I could actually use my instrument.\u201d<\/p>\n