On 'Lux,' Rosalía pulls the entire world into her symphony

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Rosalía's only constant is transformation. An artist always ahead of her time, she has continually innovated at a speed that many of her peers have stumbled to keep up with. The Spanish artist first broke onto the international stage with an avant-garde, electronic take on her home country's flamenco on the 2018 album El Mal Querer. In 2022 she released Motomami, on which she shifted to an overtly global sound, mixing reggaeton, old school hip-hop and bachata, keeping time with the guttural vocals and claps of flamenco's evocative rhythms.

After Motomami, which took home album of the year at the Latin Grammys, it felt almost impossible to predict where the genre shape-shifter would go next. But on her new album Lux, out Nov. 7, the artist goes all the way back in time, to the classics of symphonic sound and opera vocals. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, the album is maximalist — it plays like a dramatic score for an extremely intense, epic film. Rosalía isn't singing on top of the symphony but rather in tandem with it. The instrumentation fortifies her voice and message as she threads the line of folk music and classical tradition with contemporary electronic accents.

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On the album, Rosalía also sings in 13 different languages, taking musical inspiration across the world, from Mexico to China. Lux sounds like it was made by an artist who comes from everywhere, experiencing the whole world simultaneously. When she sat down with me recently in Mexico City, Rosalía said she wanted the record to be big enough to