Spanish pop auteur ROSALÍA has spent her profession dismantling the boundaries between flamenco custom and experimental pop, however “Berghain” is likely to be her most audacious assertion but.
The lead single from her fourth studio album LUX options Icelandic legend Björk and avant-garde artist Yves Tumor on a tri-lingual, orchestrally charged meditation on love, loss, and mortality. It’s three acts of watching your coronary heart break unfold.
If Motomami fractured pop, LUX consecrates it. The place that album rewired reggaeton and digital chaos right into a self-portrait of management, Berghain restores formality via religion and theatre.
It’s Rosalía reclaiming the form of grandeur pop not often dares anymore; treating emotion not as a product however as ritual.
Orchestral Obsession
The observe opens with German lyrics sung over piano and swelling strings. Manufacturing comes from Noah Goldstein, Jake Miller, and Sir Dylan, layering baroque instrumentation with moments of stark intimacy.
Image carrying a full symphony round while simply making an attempt to get via your day. That’s the sensation right here.
ROSALÍA’s verses shift between German and Spanish, her voice shifting from fragile whisper to full-throated declaration.
When she sings “Solo soy un terrón de azúcar / Sé que me funde el calor” (I’m only a sugar dice / I do know the warmth melts me), there’s no intelligent wordplay. Simply the uncooked acknowledgment of your individual dissolution, easy and devastating.
It’s additionally the place the Rosalia Berghain lyrics that means turns into clearest: heartbreak reframed as sacred ceremony.
Björk’s contribution arrives like a visitation. Her refrain, delivered in German, transforms the chorus “Seine Angst ist meine Angst / Seine Wut ist meine Wut” (His concern is my concern / His anger is my anger) into one thing each devotional and harmful.
She described her involvement on Instagram as watching ROSALÍA “develop” and praised the album’s genre-switching strategy as “fierce.” That phrase captures the managed chaos of “Berghain” completely.
Then Yves Tumor’s outro crashes in with English lyrics that shift the music’s register solely: “I’ll fuck you until you like me” repeated like a mantra, like a menace, like a prayer.
It’s uncomfortable and confrontational. Non secular longing collides with bodily desperation in a means that makes you squirm, however that discomfort feels solely vital.
The orchestral components had been organized and carried out by Daníel Bjarnason and recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Street Studio 2, including a bodily weight that contrasts the digital intimacy of her earlier work.
Mixing engineer Manny Marroquin reportedly stored Rosalía’s vocals virtually dry in sections to protect that feeling of publicity.
A Jewelled Coronary heart Failing
Lyrically, Berghain behaves like a requiem; every verse a confession, every refrain a type of penance.
The music performs out like a medical tragedy wearing spiritual imagery. ROSALÍA positions herself as a affected person with a failing coronary heart (described as “la joya”, the jewel), visiting medical doctors (jewellers) who supply no hope.
That orchestral association shadowing her all through? It’s the intrusive ideas, the mounting dread, the soundtrack to your individual decline.
Fan discussions and evaluation level to the Snow White imagery as deliberate. ROSALÍA wanders via the forest of her despair, misplaced and ready for one thing.
Rescue, demise, transformation, no matter comes first. The sugar dice works on a number of ranges: sweetness that dissolves below strain, a life consumed too rapidly, pleasure collapsing within the face of ache.
Björk’s “divine intervention” chorus reads much less like optimism and extra like resignation. When human options fail, what’s left? Look forward to grace, or as Yves Tumor’s part suggests, demand it via sheer drive of will and repetition.
The music’s remaining bars mirror a coronary heart’s final beats. The orchestra slows, the voice fades, and in ROSALÍA’s telling, her soul rises “like a dove.”
It’s a Catholic ending to a really Catholic piece of artwork, treating struggling as one thing value witnessing in full.
The Visuals: Theatre, Loss of life, and Ascension
The music video for “Berghain” extends the music’s operatic imaginative and prescient into full cinematic spectacle. Filmed in Poland, and directed by Nicolas Méndez, the visible narrative follows ROSALÍA via a sequence of tableaux that blur the road between fairy story and non secular procession.
The orchestra that haunts the music materialises within the video as a full ensemble that follows ROSALÍA via completely different on a regular basis scenes.
It’s Snow White meets funeral procession, and the theatricality of all of it one way or the other makes the despair really feel extra acute quite than ridiculous.
What makes the video work is its dedication to the bit. There’s no realizing wink, no second the place the artifice breaks.
Whether or not you discover it shifting or extreme most likely is dependent upon how a lot you’re prepared to fulfill her at that degree of depth.
Sacred Meets Profane
The accompanying imagery and teasers ROSALÍA shared on her Substack confirmed sheet music for piano and voice with the title “BERGHAIN” in capitals.
An early trace on the music’s classical ambitions. The aesthetic all through the LUX marketing campaign has leaned closely into Christian iconography, not as conservative assertion however as elevation. ROSALÍA treats pop music prefer it deserves stained glass home windows.
In doing so, she joins a lineage of avant-pop architects, from Björk’s Homogenic to FKA twigs’ MAGDALENE, who blur the strains between worship and need.
But Rosalía’s interpretation feels uniquely Iberian, steeped in Catholic imagery the place magnificence and struggling are inseparable.
Berghain can also be the identify of Berlin’s most infamous techno membership, recognized for its hedonistic ambiance and brutal door coverage.
The juxtaposition feels solely intentional. ROSALÍA has all the time understood that worship and need aren’t as separate as we fake.
What Folks Are Saying
Since its launch, “Berghain” has sparked intense dialogue throughout music boards and response movies.
Listeners on Reddit’s popheads neighborhood have praised the music’s theatrical ambition while debating its accessibility. This isn’t one thing you half-listen to while doing the washing up.
Critics have famous the music’s place inside ROSALÍA’s evolution from the flamenco-fusion of El Mal Querer via the experimental pop of Motomami to LUX‘s extra explicitly art-music aspirations.
The place earlier work felt like style workout routines (what occurs once you apply reggaeton to heartbreak?), “Berghain” abandons style altogether.
The collaboration feels important too. Björk and Yves Tumor aren’t simply featured artists; they’re co-conspirators.
Every brings their very own relationship to blurred boundaries. Björk between human and pure world, Yves Tumor between masculine and female, rock and R&B. Along with ROSALÍA, they’ve created one thing genuinely unusual.
Critics have drawn parallels between Berghain and the grandiosity of Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love, noting how Rosalía harnesses orchestral kind not as nostalgia however rebel.
On social media, followers have dubbed it “opera-pop for the algorithm age,” admiring the way it rejects prompt gratification.
Why It Works (Or Doesn’t)
“Berghain” received’t be everybody’s thought of a very good time. Too gradual for the membership that shares its identify, too dramatic for informal listening, too bizarre for radio.
However that’s exactly what makes it outstanding. ROSALÍA has reached a degree the place she will pack an orchestra right into a metaphorical truck, sing in three languages, forged Björk as a divine messenger, and let Yves Tumor shut with profane repetition. By some means all of it coheres.
The music succeeds as a result of it takes its personal feelings severely. No winking irony, no hedging bets. In case you’re going to make a music about dying from heartbreak, why not go full opera?
That dedication to extremity separates ROSALÍA from her friends. Whether or not “Berghain” is a masterpiece or an enchanting mess most likely is dependent upon your tolerance for theatrical extra, however there’s one thing admirable about an artist treating a damaged coronary heart like the tip of the world.
As a result of typically it’s.
“Berghain” is on the market now on all streaming platforms. LUX (Versión Física) is out 7 November 2025 through Columbia Data.
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