The Gospel According to Rosalía

 

Blasphemy has always been more interesting than devotion. Rosalía knows it. That’s why Lux opens with Sexo, Violencia y Llantas, a title that sounds more like Las Vegas than The Apparitions. The ultraconservatives see here a supposed return to religious values. They’re wrong. This isn’t faith, it’s aesthetic appropriation. Madonna did this in 1989 with Like a Prayer, burning crosses while the Vatican foamed at the mouth. Kate Bush “made a deal with God” in Running Up That Hill. Kanye West built a megalomaniac temple called Jesus Is King. Rosalía simply swapped gospel choirs for flamenco claps and called it avant garde.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Lux is Jesus Is King with an Andalusian accent. Same messianic obsession, same urgency to transcend pop, same ambiguous result. West thought he was God when he made that album. Rosalía, smarter, just pays Him a visit. The string arrangements that flood Lux, omnipresent to the point of exhaustion, aren’t radical innovation, they’re stolen art history. The Beatles used them in Eleanor Rigby. ELO built an entire career on them (Does anyone remember the cellos on the Beach Boys' Good Vibrations, Lou Reed's Street Hassle, or John Cale's viola on the Velvet Underground?). Björk twisted them beyond recognition in her best songs. Rosalía makes them pretty, like flowers on an altar. Functional. Effective. Safe. Too safe.

Reliquia brings techno and flamenco straight out of El Mal Querer, that 2018 debut that still stands as her masterpiece. Here, she sounds more like Nick Cave than Marcos Witt, more The Boatman’s Call than Hillsong. Divinize is Rosalía doing Björk cosplay with a touch of Fiona Apple, while the strings remind us that Paul McCartney invented this game sixty years ago. There are genuine moments: those minimalist hip hop beats evoking Wu-Tang Clan, the ghostly trip hop of Porcelana that could’ve come from Tricky or Scott Walker’s apocalyptic Bish Bosch. But they’re flashes in an album more eager to impress than to risk.

Berghain, the lead single, is where the reference game becomes academic. The abrupt cuts come from Kanye. The story of Berghain, the legendary Berlin nightclub, you already know (though you probably don’t know who Ben Klock is, the resident DJ who turned that Soviet bunker into a techno cathedral). The arrangements quote Vivaldi, Paganini, and Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana. It’s all there, perfectly catalogued. What’s missing is Diamanda Galás howling in the shadows or Magma’s progressive madness. Rosalía studied for this exam. She passed with honors. But geniuses don’t study, they cannibalize.

The collaborations save entire moments. Björk whispers “This is Divine Intervention...” as if she was been directed in Dancer in the Dark. Yves Tumor screams “I’ll fuck you till you love me...” with the sexual violence Almodóvar would perfectly understand. It’s La Mala Educación turned into a techno-flamenco opera, Lars von Trier shooting in Seville. La Perla steals shamelessly from Björk’s It’s Oh So Quiet, that playful cover that now feels like a blueprint. De Madrugá returns to El Mal Querer territory without adding anything new. Dios Es Un Stalker tries to fuse her three eras, El Mal Querer, Motomami, Lux. and for a moment, it sounds like A Tribe Called Quest jamming with legendary bassist Ron Carter, but in a Madrid flamenco bar.

But here’s the issue: Lux is deconstruction without reconstruction. Like Martin Margiela taking apart a vintage suit to create something “new” that’s still just old fragments reassembled. Rosalía took Kanye’s divine megalomania, the brutalist maximalism of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, the liturgical aesthetic West mistook for revelation, and translated it into her own language, or several. The result is competent, sometimes beautiful, never necessary. This isn’t Kate Bush locking herself away for years to give birth to Hounds of Love. It’s not Björk recording Vespertine in Icelandic darkness. It’s not Scott Walker vanishing for a decade to return with The Drift, that unclassifiable monster nobody asked for and everyone needed.

Lux is the work of a pop star who needs to feel her art matters beyond Spotify numbers and TikTok trends. And that’s her problem and her truth: Rosalía is already sacred canon, like Björk or Kanye. Whatever she does, she remains immense. Her fans didn’t buy an album, they bought an identity. They’ll follow her anywhere, even if it’s only to her own church, even if she no longer sings reggaeton. Lux shines, but that light is reflection, not fire. Blasphemy would’ve been better than this calculated devotion.