"Catalonia's premier pop star, Rosalía, invokes her namesake's defiantly shaven head in her new single, "Reliquia." Following a broken engagement with the Puerto Rican singer-songwriter Rauw Alejandro in 2023, Rosalía compares her incremental loss of innocence to a crumbling religious figurine losing hands, eyes, and more to time and travel. Her heart, the second verse advises, has never been her own, and her fate is to give endlessly of herself."
"tense strings and choral asides replacing the equatorial pop of past hits like 2019's "Con Altura" and 2022's "Saoko." Lux'slead single, "Berghain," feeds lyrics that grasp for the starry-eyed curtness of the Bible's Song of Solomon - "His love is my love / His blood is my blood" - to a choir to sing in stabs of percussive German, like the kind of classical work that enjoys a second life in horror-film soundtracks."
Rosalía draws on the figure of Saint Rosalia, paralleling renunciation and a shaven head with themes of sacrifice and loss. The single "Reliquia" frames a broken engagement and diminishing innocence through the image of a crumbling religious figurine and a heart that never belonged to the singer. Album artwork depicts Rosalía in a nun's habit and straitjacket-like top, signaling a collision of devotion and delusion. Musically the work shifts toward cathedral-scale arrangements, with tense strings, choral elements, and dramatic swells replacing previously equatorial pop, while lyrics blur faith, fame, and desire.
Read at Vulture
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