ROSALÍA

Sant Esteve Sesrovires, then a conservatoire

Rosalía Vila Tobella was born on 25 September 1992 in Sant Cugat del Vallès and raised in Sant Esteve Sesrovires, a small town in the Catalan interior. No one in her family played music. She has said she found flamenco at fourteen, through the recordings of Camarón de la Isla, and worked backwards from there — an unusual route into a tradition normally passed down inside families and neighbourhoods rather than picked up from a stereo.

She took it seriously enough to train formally, studying at the Catalonia College of Music and graduating in 2017. Her debut album, Los Ángeles, made that same year with the producer Raül Refree, began life as her degree thesis: voice and guitar, death as its subject, almost nothing else in the arrangement. Alongside the flamenco lineage she cites Björk and James Blake as formative, describing Blake's 2011 debut as one of the most consequential records she has heard. Both influences — the austere and the electronically warped — show up repeatedly in what followed.

Three records, three rebuilds

El mal querer, released in 2018, was the record that moved her out of Spain. It applied studio production and pop structure to flamenco forms without pretending the two were the same thing, and it has since become the highest-placed Spanish-language album on Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list. In 2019 the J Balvin collaboration 'Con altura' pushed her into the reggaeton mainstream, and she became the first Spanish-singing act nominated for Best New Artist at the Grammys.

Motomami followed in 2022 and went the other way — fragmented, abrasive, built around sharp edits and sudden collapses. It ended the year as Metacritic's best-reviewed album. By then she had accumulated two Grammys and eleven Latin Grammys, two of them for Album of the Year, along with thirteen number-one singles in Spain, more than any other Spanish woman.

The pattern across the three is that she does not extend a record; she abandons it. Each album has demolished the method of the one before, which is what made the fourth difficult to predict and what made its eventual shape — a choral and orchestral work — less of a swerve than it first appeared.

Lux

Lux arrived on 7 November 2025 through Columbia Records, recorded between 2023 and 2025 in the UK, Spain, France and the United States. It runs about an hour, is divided into four movements, and is built on the London Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Daníel Bjarnason, with Caroline Shaw among the arrangers and Pharrell Williams and Noah Goldstein among the producers. Rosalía sings across fourteen languages. The organising idea is hagiography: each movement takes its cues from the lives of female saints and mystics, Hildegard of Bingen and Joan of Arc among them.

The guest list is not a pop guest list. Björk, the Portuguese fado singer Carminho, the flamenco singer Estrella Morente, Silvia Pérez Cruz, Yves Tumor, the Mexican-American group Yahritza y Su Esencia and the Escolania de Montserrat boys' choir all appear. The lead single, 'Berghain', released in October 2025 with Björk and Yves Tumor, set the terms: orchestral, multilingual, structurally unstable.

Critics went further than they had for Motomami. Lux closed 2025 as the best-reviewed album on Metacritic with a score of 95. It entered the Billboard 200 and the UK albums chart at number four and went to number one in Spain, Portugal, Belgium, Austria and Switzerland, and its 42.1 million first-day Spotify streams were a record for a female Spanish-language artist. Three more singles followed — 'La Perla' in December 2025, 'Sauvignon Blanc' in February 2026 and 'Focu 'Ranni' in April 2026 — and an expanded edition, Lux (Complete Works), added four tracks in April 2026.

Where she stands now

The 2026 Latin Grammy nominations were announced on 16 September 2026, the same week the tour ended. Rosalía took seven, including Album of the Year for Lux (Complete Works), Best Alternative Music Album, and Record of the Year, Song of the Year and Best Pop Song for 'La Perla' with Yahritza y Su Esencia. The ceremony is on 12 November 2026 at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas. The producer Edgar Barrera led the overall count; the Argentine duo CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso took ten nominations.

Her next confirmed appearance is as musical guest on Saturday Night Live on 10 October 2026. Beyond that she has said nothing concrete. Closing the tour in Miami she told the crowd she would miss singing the songs, and that an ending was necessary for there to be a question about what comes next — which is as much as anyone has to go on.

The Lux Tour, March to September 2026

The tour was announced on 4 December 2025 and opened on 16 March 2026 at the LDLC Arena outside Lyon. It ran to 57 shows over three legs and seventeen countries, taking in four nights in Madrid, four in Barcelona, two in Lisbon, two at the O2 in London, and North and South American dates through the summer, before closing on 16 September 2026 at the Kaseya Center in Miami. It was her first tour played entirely in arenas and the largest she has headlined.

The production was theatrical in a literal sense — acts, an intermezzo, costume changes, a narrative arc — rather than a run of songs with visuals attached. A semi-circular main stage faced a secondary stage laid out in the shape of a Latin cross, with the Heritage Orchestra seated on it under the conductor Yudania Gómez Heredia. The French collective (La) Horde choreographed thirteen dancers, with a separate piece by Dimitris Papaioannou for 'La Perla'; Terrivle Studio handled staging and Ann Demeulemeester contributed costumes. A botafumeiro, the giant censer swung on ropes in Santiago de Compostela cathedral, was flown over the floor during the orchestral interlude.

The sections were distinct enough to read as separate works. One opened with Rosalía on a plinth in a tutu and ballet shoes; another drew its look from Goya's El Aquelarre and carried most of the Motomami material; a third contained a Frankie Valli cover performed inside a picture frame, a confessional booth and a solo passage at a grand piano. The finale put the dancers in angel wings. Reviews were strong throughout — NME's Rhian Daly called the London show a work of art that turned the O2 into a museum, and Consequence's Paolo Ragusa, writing on Madison Square Garden, concluded that whether it was taken as a concert or a service, Rosalía was worth believing in.