The music industry has been feeling a bit… middling. Safe bet after safe bet. Albums engineered for playlist slots, polite reviews, and smooth algorithmic handshakes.
Then Rosalia’s LUX came along.
It’s something stranger, braver, and harder to package. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, it genre-glitches between opera, pop, hip hop and flamenco. While her peers are still trapped writing about putting your hands up in the club, Rosalia tells tales of female visionaries, wanders through folklore, and makes confessions about looking hot for God.
And the languages. All thirteen of them. She flips between them the way most people flip between tabs. none waits its turn. They barge in, clash, interrupt. A multilayered street market of lyrics and ideas. ChatGPT described LUX as “the sound of someone tearing up the rulebook, then using the confetti as percussion.” It’s my creative highlight because it reminds us to keep sticking two fingers up to “mid”. It’s a nudge towards the strange end of the spectrum. A reminder that you can love an industry and still refuse to live inside it. Proof that weirder wins, and fortune still favours the brave.
Hanni Randell-Bateman is strategy director at Wolff Olins
