ROSALÍA

Flouting genre conventions while exploring silence and space as much as sound, ROSALÍA has remade flamenco and pop in the process. On her 2025 album LUX, for example, she drew inspiration from a far-flung selection of female saints, even going so far as singing in their various languages. That means the songs aren’t just about her experiences, but those of her potent muses as well. “I think the best fiction has this blurry line: the sweet spot between what’s personal and what’s universal, what’s detailed and what’s abstract, what’s implicit and what’s explicit,” she told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in 2025. Born in 1992 into a non-musical family in Sant Cugat del Vallès, Spain, Rosalia Vila Tobella began singing and dancing at age nine. She began training as a flamenco singer at 13, and a decade later she released her first album, 2017’s Los Ángeles, a spare set of traditional flamenco featuring just her voice and guitarist Raül Refree. But ROSALÍA had devoured hip-hop and R&B as voraciously as flamenco while growing up, and her 2018 concept album, EL MAL QUERER, saw her demolish the barriers between those genres. Even bolder was 2022’s confessional MOTOMAMI, which enlisted new collaborators like The Weeknd and Pharrell Williams alongside longtime producer El Guincho—and racked up four Latin Grammys, among other accolades. By the release of LUX, which deployed the London Symphony Orchestra for even more lift and scope, a prodigious degree of ambition had come to be expected from everything ROSALÍA does.