Rosalía followed Chiqui to Barcelona’s premier music conservatory—La Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC)—where she’d earned the one spot per year the school has for a student who wants to specialize in flamenco singing. (Rosalía has established a scholarship at the school, and when they accepted two exceptional students for the current year, she paid for both.)
Around the time that Rosalía graduated, the director Pedro Almodóvar saw her perform in an old theater in Madrid. “Rosalía sang sitting on a chair, like the old flamenco singers used to do,” Almodóvar recalled in an email. “I was struck by this detail, which was, let’s say, canonical for a performance that wasn’t. I was surprised by her mastery of the different styles of flamenco.” He added: “From the very first moment, her extraordinary vocal ability was evident, and although she sounded like an old-school flamenco singer, everything about her was different and new.”
Later, Almodóvar cast her in his 2019 film, Pain and Glory, as a country girl, washing clothes in a river alongside Penélope Cruz. “There was a loud noise from the river current,” Almodóvar said. “I wanted to record with direct sound. To do this, I needed a singer with a powerful voice who could sing a cappella and be heard: Rosalía has that powerful voice, and even though she’s a city girl, she could easily pass for a young woman from the countryside.”
Rosalía’s first album, Los Ángeles, released in 2017 when she was still at the conservatory, is a semi-traditional flamenco album that has a former punk musician on guitar (Raül Refree) and a cover of Will Oldham’s “I See a Darkness.” Her second, El Mal Querer, a flamenco-pop hybrid that began as her baccalaureate thesis, is based on a 13th-century Occitan novel called Flamenca and includes a song that interpolates Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me a River.” (It won Best Latin Rock Album at the Grammys and Album of the Year at the Latin Grammys.)
Because her first two albums relied on guitar, she had a no-guitars rule for her third, Motomami, a loop-heavy experiment in which she jumps from reggaeton and jazz to trap and bachata, references Lil’ Kim and M.I.A., and, on “Bizcochito,” lets us know: “I didn’t base my career on making hits / I have hits because I formed the basis.” (Again, she won the Grammy for Best Latin Rock Album, as well as four Latin Grammys.)
Going into Lux, Rosalía made a new rule: No loops. She wanted to spend less time in front of a computer, to use her instrument more, to really sing.
“I wanted it to be más físico,” she said. “Music in its physical state. That can be instruments, objects. It can be human. It can be the air, the metal, the wood. And the orchestra, in a way, I feel it’s maybe the most monumental version of that. Of music in its physical form.”