LUX

Rosalía wants the world. Since crashing into public consciousness with her glittering  2018 breakthrough El Mal Querer — and the tidal wave of critical praise, brand deals and accusations of appropriation that came in its wake — the Spanish pop star has maintained an anachronistic belief in music's capacity for borderless cultural exchange. In her utopian vision of pop's future, any rules are rattled to pieces by divine frequency.This credo has never been more clear than on LUX, an album-length manifesto on the interconnectivity of the world, the universality of music and heartbreak, and the transformative power of faith. The LP also represents an inversion of Rosalía's prior approach to composition — where she once stippled the edges of her fizzing, globe-trotting pop with experimental detours and alien textures, LUX finds the songwriter and producer distilling her eyebrow-raising omnivorousness into long, measured strokes of deep colour; the Dadaist of MOTOMAMI has found a taste for the Baroque.The bratty playfulness that once animated Rosalía's music is largely gone (though it resurfaces, luckily, in small spurts of levity), having been replaced by a grandiose, classically-indebted sweep that sounds like little else being made in the sphere of pop music today. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and divided into four movements sung in 13 languages, LUX is a genuinely overwhelming experience, the sound of an artist so enthralled by the act of creation that it threatens to swallow her whole."I fit in the world / And the world fits into me / I take up the world / And the world occupies me," Rosalía sings on the expansive third-act epic "La Yugular," a love letter to God that references pre-Socratic Greek philosopher Anaxagoras and samples Patti Smith. If that all sounds like a bit much, that's because it is — the record is in constant danger of toppling under its own weight. Thankfully, Rosalía largely manages to keep her head above the swell of her own ambition.Built on enormous waves of strings, brass, choir, thunderous kettledrums, bells and flamenco rhythms, it's a miracle just how nimble LUX sounds. The record's classical worship is tempered with sparkling electronic detail and spacious production, best exemplified by the galloping art-pop of "Reliquia" and "Divinize," as well as the opalescent surge of the physical release-exclusive "Focu 'ranni," a wild-eyed ode to a broken engagement that may or may not be about Rosalía's former partner, Puerto Rican pop star Rauw Alejandro.It's these small strokes of humanity and humour that keep Rosalía's grand ideas and holy reveries from becoming claustrophobic; the stately, waltzing "La Perla" is a scathing takedown of a "Local fiasco / National heartbreaker / Emotional terrorist / World-class fuck up" who broke her heart, while the winking "Dios Es un Stalker" plays like "Every Breath You Take" for those in religious psychosis.The tension between these two states – that of the earthbound musician restricted by the limits of the human heart and the boundless, universal force that animates her wildest creative fantasies – is what holds LUX aloft, suspended in the place between here and heaven. It's a pretty stunning achievement, and one only possible because its creator believes, however naively, in a world more holistic, connected and full of possibility than the one we find ourselves in."How I'd like to give it up / This whole world / Move back again / Into my momma, bless her soul / Move back again / And see if in a new world I'd find more truth," Rosalía sings on "Mundo Nuevo." On LUX, she seems closer than ever to a gospel all her own.