Hannah Rich unpacks the religious imagery and themes in ‘Lux’ – the new album by Rosalía. 27/11/2025

I am a woman in my mid–thirties, with an underused modern languages degree languishing dustily on the shelf, one foot still in my Catholic heritage, working for a religion and society think tank. Rosalía’s new album? Of course I love it.

If the lyrics were set texts on a Spanish literature module back in uni, I would be relishing the prospect of annotating and drawing out all the hidden and not–so–hidden religious imagery woven throughout the Catalan singer’s recent breakout album Lux. If anything, it is maybe more surprising that it has reached an audience beyond my personal niche. An album written in Spanish and Catalan, blending pop, rap and classical opera, with riffs in 12 other languages including Latin, Arabic, Sicilian and Hebrew, inspired by a veritable girl gang of mystics, saints and icons from various faiths – from Teresa of Avila, to the Buddhist nun Vimala, via Simone Weil and the Old Testament prophetess Miriam – doesn’t scream mainstream success. And yet, a hit it has been.

Maybe this is the year of unexpected religious inspiration in chart–topping albums; in a very different genre, my colleague Rob recently wrote about the latest from the rapper Dave, a hip–hop collection equally improbably inspired by the life of King David in the Old Testament.

The first single from Lux, ‘Berghain,’ is inspired by St Hildegard of Bingen, the 12th century German Benedictine abbess known for her ecstatic visions of God. ‘His love is my love / His blood is my blood,’ Rosalía sings, echoing Hildegard’s intimate descriptions of unity with Christ, ‘the only way to save us is through divine intervention’. (Elsewhere in this beatific odyssey through pop culture, the ‘suggested for you’ feed on my Instagram last week served me a reel expounding the theory that Hildegard herself was responsible for inventing pumpkin spice, and thus the autumn girl spirituality circle was complete.)

‘La Yugular’ takes its inspiration from the first female Islamic saint, Rabia Al Adawiyya, whose line that ‘no woman ever claimed to be God’ is quoted in Spanish on the physical copy of the album. Channelling Rabia, Rosalía sings about how ‘a continent does not fit in Him / But He fits in my chest / And my chest occupies His love / And in His love I want to lose myself.’ It is lyrically reminiscent of Mary Magdalene’s ‘I Don’t Know How to Love Him’ in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar, a portrayal of a complicated saint similarly conflicted about whether to react in anger, or love, or both. ‘Look, I don’t have time to hate Lucifer / I’m too busy loving you, Undibel,’ she sings. Undibel is a Spanish Romani word for God, inspired by Rosalía’s Flamenco background.

Here is a love that you cannot fit into the boxes of typical male characters, nor into the typical imaginations of saints responding to God as male.

Another song (‘De Madrugá’) draws on the story of Olga of Kyiv, a 10th century Eastern Orthodox saint whose road to canonisation was marked by vengeance for the death of her husband. ‘The cross on my chest calibrates my body / I’ve got every right to get even,’ sings a narrator trying to convince herself she doesn’t want revenge at dawn.

The whole album then is a hymnal to the contradictions of female spirituality in the material world. From the opening lines (‘Who could live between the two / first to love the world and then to love God’), it is riven with the sense of being torn between this world and a higher one, this consciousness and a deeper one. The first is characterised by sex, violence and tyres, the second by glitter, doves, fruit and grace. From start to finish, the female voice wrestles with the human instinct for the former while also embracing the mystic’s capacity to elevate above it.

Lux is hagiographical in the sense that its core texts are the lives of the saints, but Rosalía’s icons do not carry the undue reverence or unattainable perfection usually associated with hagiography. Women are ‘imperfect, agents of chaos,’ prone to ‘dismantle ourselves like myths’. The album cover depicts Rosalía in a white veil; a parallel with another of my musical highlights of 2025, Self Esteem’s A Complicated Woman which sees the singer dressed in a costume that is part nun, part Handmaid’s Tale as she performs songs eviscerating the illusion of a woman with a straightforward inner life.  

The tendency to flit between the material and the divine, to diminish herself while in the same breath seeking complete unity with God reaches its apotheosis in the Latin refrain of ‘Ego sum nihil / ego sum lux mundi’ (‘I am nothing / I am the light of the world’) in ‘Porcelana’.

In interviews around the album’s release, Rosalía has spoken at length about her relationship with God and with faith, embracing its nuances and contradictions. She engages with the physicality of prayer (‘Each vertebra reveals a mystery / Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary’) as well as the mysterious elements of faith; Christ ‘cries diamonds,’ which alludes to both the value of a deity’s tears and the supernatural occurrences of statues appearing to cry. Elsewhere, she muses on the surreal coincidence of her namesake, Rosalía of Palermo, who fled her own wedding to surrender her life to God as a hermit. Rosalía also broke off an engagement and describes the album as her gift back to God for all he has given her.

Xabier Gómez García, the bishop of Sant Feliu de Llobregat diocese, wrote an open letter to his flock – among whom is Rosalía’s grandmother, a regular mass goer – in which he honoured the way the singer ‘speaks with absolute freedom and without hang–ups about what she feels God to be, and the desire, the thirst (to know God).’ The album represents ‘a spiritual search through the testimonies of women of immense spiritual maturity,’ the bishop wrote, while acknowledging the provocative nature of lyrics that might sit uneasily with many of the devout in the pews. Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça, the Vatican’s culture minister, has also commented on the album, recognising that Rosalía ‘captures a profound need in contemporary culture to approach spirituality, to cultivate an inner life’. Her work speaks to the profound spiritual desire – in its most visceral sense – that is ever more prominent in young women’s lives.

It is probably overstating it to describe the album is a spiritual experience even for an English speaker, but I do think that you can get a sense of the mystical, semi–religious adoration of the saints that comes through even without comprehending a word of it. A colleague who I recommended Lux to recently said that they had initially thought they’d listened to the wrong album, or the wrong Rosalía, because it felt like it came from another time and place. It truly is a ‘thin place’ in musical form.

If to sing really is to pray twice, as the aphorism attributed to a variety of saints goes, then Rosalía’s Lux is heaving under the weight of prayers, voiced and unvoiced.

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