On November 7th, the Spanish pop singer Rosalia released her fourth album, which is the peak of her discography thus far, and also now the second-highest rated album on Metacritic, at a whopping 98/100. This album was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, with Daniel Bjarnason at the helm, conducting, along with many, MANY other talented musicians helping with the creation of this album, such as the legendary Pharrell Williams.

Although in another language, a huge highlight of this album is the lyrics to the music, which are incredibly poetic lines that industry plants wish they’d written. Its track listing is fifteen different songs split into four movements, with lyrics from across 14 separate languages that all tell a different story. This album blends contemporary, modern pop, and classical music, while making it accessible to the masses, making this unusual sonic mix sound extremely natural. Rosalia herself has a beautiful voice, which is always a positive thing in an album, and is what the album seems to focus on throughout the entirety of the runtime.

The albums’ themes are wide and sweeping, such as ideas about love, death, forgiveness, heartbreak, God, femininity, and so many other deep and existential ideas. The highlight of the album is the final movement. While it is much smaller in scale, it is far from smaller in sound, being the most grandiose-sounding movement on the EP out of the four. This album feels like a much more complete vision than her previous three releases before this.

Is this a pop album? Very much so, but it is far from the commercial releases of Swift, Eilish, or Carpenter, making it a huge breath of fresh air in the heavily corporatized pop space. I think Variety magazine describes it best with the beautiful quote, “In a world oversaturated with noise, this level of artistic conviction reminds us that the boldest creators resist stasis. The deeper they turn inward, the more the world leans in to listen.”