An album about female saints and martyrs, sung in 13 languages and featuring both Björk and the London Symphony Orchestra doesn’t sound like the making of a 2025 club banger, but Rosalía is no ordinary artist. Her fourth studio album, Lux, released in November and quickly became a late contender for everyone’s album of the year. The Catalonian singer has just announced a global tour off the back of it, playing 42 arenas across 17 countries, including one date at the O2 in London.
Lux is an exploration of her Catholic faith and her obsession with the religion’s female avatars, and Rosalía has dyed a blonde halo into her dark hair to mark its release. “I pray every night before I fall asleep,” she told the Guardian. “It’s a very personal relationship with God.”
She is bored of the self-referential celebrity circuit, saying she’s “really much more excited about saints”. Hildegard of Bingen, Santa Olga de Kyiv, and Islamic Sufi saint Rabia al-Adawiyya all get referenced, amongst others. The album cover features her in a wimple and a white habit that resembles a straightjacket, and has received praise from the Vatican itself for discussing faith.
It’s a big departure from Motomami, where Rosalía posed naked on the cover apart from a motorcycle helmet. There has been some controversy over the suggestion that Rosalía, a Spanish woman, embraced a sexy Latina aesthetic to become popular with Motomami, only to ditch it in favour of a modest European Catholic image for Lux.
The arguments about cultural appropriation and coloniser attitudes came to a head when a comment she made about Bad Bunny and singing in different languages were taken as an attack on the Puerto Rican rapper. “I’ve always been grateful to Latin America,” Rosalía posted on Instagram in an apology. “Despite coming from another place, the Latin people have always supported me throughout my career.”
Real ‘Motobabies’ (as she calls her fans) have always known Rosalía Vila Tobella, now 33, was a genre-bending mastermind. She bagged her first Latin Grammy nomination for Best New Artist with her 2017 debut album, the self-produced Los Ángeles, aged just 24. Obsessed with flamenco, a folklore genre from her native southern Spain, she was studying at the Catalonia College of Music as one of just five students accepted each year on its prestigious Interpretation of Flamenco Singing course.
“At 13, I fell in love with it, but I couldn’t sing it,” Rosalía told W Magazine in 1019. “To sing flamenco is like being a kind of opera singer. You have to learn how. Flamenco is dark—it’s about tragedy and intensity. Those are the traits I became passionate about.” She’d already had to recover from major surgery as a teenager, to repair the damage caused to her vocal chords by over singing.
In 2018 she released her second album, El Mal Querer, which was born out of her final thesis project and inspired by the 13th century novel Le Roman de Flamenca, about a young woman imprisoned by a jealous lover. Flemenco purists sniffed at it, but Pitchfork gave it a rave 8.8 score and called it “relentlessly gorgeous”. It won her Album of the Year at the Latin Grammys, the New York Times christened her the “Rihanna of flamenco”, and Rosalía’s team had to politely turn down Madonna’s invitation for the artist to perform at her birthday party in Morocco (the logistics allegedly became too complex).
It was Motomami, Rosalía’s third album, that propelled her into the global spotlight in 2022. Masterfully blending pop and reggaeton with her flamenco lodestar, she still refused to bend to expectations and sing in English. Her single Chicken Teriyaki — a fast and furious pean to Japanese kawaii by way of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s 1981 painting Arroz con Pollo — went viral on TikTok and charted from Peru to Mexico. Rosalía left the 2022 Latin Grammys with an armful of awards: Album of the Year; Best Alternative Music Album; Best Engineered Album; and Best Recording Package. She made history as the first woman to win Album of the Year twice.
Rosalía also became a fixture on the cool girl circuit, having collab-ed with Billie Eilish on their song Lo Vas A Olvidar. She dated Hunter Schafer, star of HBO show Euphoria, for five months in 2019. The couple were photographed at the Burberry SS20 show (alongside Dua Lipa) and furniture shopping in California. The press coyly termed them ‘pals’, but Schafer confirmed they had dated in a GQ interview last year and said they remained close. “She’s family no matter what,” said Schafer. Rosalía is now set to star in the third season of Euphoria, due 2026.
Then there was the iconic photo of Rosalía arriving at Charli xcx’s 32nd birthday party clutching a huge bouquet of funerial black Calla lilies with cigarettes for stamens and packs of Parliaments stuffed between the foliage. The two stars are rumoured to be friends, and Rosalía named Charli xcx as one of the artists she’d most like to collaborate with earlier this year.
Rosalía also dates men, and was engaged to Rauw Alejandro, a reggaetón star from Puerto Rico, until they broke it off in 2023. The singer hasn’t discussed the relationship publically, but fans have been reading into the lyrics of Lux, particularly the song La Perla, where she calls out an un-named ex for being a “local fiasco, national heartbreaker, emotional terrorist, world-class f*** up” that kept her “bra collection”.
She went on to date American actor Jeremy Allen White in 2024, and was seen kissing German actor Emilio Sakraya this summer. Rosalía is staying silent on her current relationship status, telling Elle she has been “in seclusion” while working on her latest album.
Saints, musical scholarship and scandal — combined with Rosalía’s prodigious talent, expect the singer to go stratospheric in 2026. Start polishing your halos now.
