Spanish singer-songwriter Rosalía performed two songs from her acclaimed album, Lux, on Saturday Night Live.
Rosalía, who trained with a professional ballerina to prepare for the choreography on her tour for Lux, appeared to sing all of “Reliquia” while on her toes, as shadows of orchestral musicians were cast on the white curtain behind her.
“Magnolias,” the 18th and final song on Lux, Rosalía sang in the rain, dressed in white, against a dark backdrop.
In a five-star review, Rolling Stone said the album “sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now, and it’s an album no other pop star could have made.” After 2022’s Motomami and El Mal Querer four years prior, Lux “feels like her most astonishing offer yet, packed with history and decades of training that let her tie classical sounds, opera references, and 14 different languages into one gorgeous, gutting package that feels like a truly timeless work of art.”
The hour-long, four-movement album, Rosalía said in a press release announcing it last year, is “a widescreen emotional arc of feminine mystique, transformation, and spirituality—moving between intimacy and operatic scale to create a radiant world where sound, language, and culture fuse as one.”
The 34-year-old artist said the songs were inspired by learning about saints.
“Because my background is Catholic from my family, so you understand it through this one [lens],” she told Billboard. “But then you realize that in other cultures and other religious contexts, it’s another thing. But what surprised me a lot was that there’s a main theme, which is not fearing, which you can find shared across many religions. And I think that’s so powerful because probably the fears that I have, somebody on the other side of the world has the same ones. And for me, there’s beauty in that, in understanding that we might think that we’re different, but we’re not.”
Lux, which came out last November, reached the top spot in several countries, including Billboard’s Top Classical Albums, Top Latin Albums, and World Albums in the U.S.
Rosalía just wrapped up her Lux Tour and has no new dates scheduled. She may next take the stage in the coming weeks at the Billboard Latin Music Awards and the Latin Grammys, where Lux has pending nominations.
