You could see it as divine intervention. When Rosalía, the Catalan pop sensation known for her bold, genre-hopping sound, released her fourth album, Lux, earlier this month, the reviews were ecstatic. “A masterpiece… possibly the best album of the year,” wrote The Independent’s Roisin O’Connor. “A truly compelling, involving experience … uniformly beautiful,” praised The Guardian.
These rapturous write-ups feel especially impressive when you consider this is not your run-of-the-mill pop record. Spread across four movements and sung in 13 languages, Lux is a concept album structured around the lives of female saints and mystics, including the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen and the Hebrew prophetess Miriam. It also features operatic vocals, massed choirs, fado singer Carminho, poetry from Patti Smith, plus thundering accompaniment from the London Symphony Orchestra. To call Lux esoteric would be an understatement, yet that hasn’t stopped it from landing in the Top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart, or from topping the Billboard Latin, Classical and World album charts.
