Rosalia has spent her career asking what pop can actually hold. On her debut she asked whether flamenco could survive translation. On El Mal Querer she asked whether ancient text could carry contemporary longing. On MOTOMAMI she asked whether chaos and control could coexist in the same three minutes. On LUX, her fourth album, the question is bigger: can a pop record contain everything? The answer, remarkable and a little overwhelming, is yes.

LUX is arranged in four movements and sung in thirteen languages. It enlists the London Symphony Orchestra, Catalan choirs, Caroline Shaw, Angelica Negron, Pharrell, and a dozen other collaborators whose credits read like the faculty list of a conservatory that does not actually exist but absolutely should. It opens with Rosalia announcing her intention to travel from Earth to Heaven and back. It spends the next hour making good on the promise.

This is not an album that rewards passive listening. It demands your attention and then, once it has that, does something unexpected with it: it makes you feel, rather than think. For all its scholarship and structural ambition, LUX is not a homework assignment. It is an operatic argument for the idea that pop music can carry the full weight of human experience, including the parts that organized religion and classical music usually claim for themselves.

The flamenco-pop of La Rumba Del Perdon is glorious and grounded, the kind of thing that could soundtrack a street corner or a cathedral with equal conviction. The waltzing insult of La Perla lands somewhere between a love letter and a court case. Memoria swells with the particular sadness of someone who has loved deeply and lost track of what that means. These are not small moments. They are the things albums are supposed to do but rarely do.

Sauvignon Blanc is the most nakedly personal track here. Rosalia vows to burn the Rolls-Royce and throw out the Jimmy Choos in exchange for something she cannot name but clearly needs. The transaction she is describing is familiar to anyone who has ever felt that the life they are living and the self they actually are have drifted dangerously apart. That she frames this in terms of luxury goods and religious renunciation is entirely on brand and entirely sincere, which is the central trick of the whole album.

Dios es un stalker turns God into an obsessive, feral and unstoppable, and delivers this over clean bass and choral filigree that sounds like the strangest prayer you have ever heard. The effect is hilarious and moving in roughly equal measure. This is the Rosalia move: the sacred and the absurd sharing the same bar, neither one diminished by the other’s presence.

LUX is a long record. There are moments where its density becomes a kind of friction, where you feel the weight of the ambition more than the lift of it. But those moments are few, and they are always resolved by something extraordinary waiting on the other side. Rosalia is operating at a level that almost no one else in pop music is anywhere near. LUX is the proof.