“I never listen to my albums”: Rosalía spent two years on Lux and will not hear it again

“I never listen to my albums,” Rosalía told CBS Sunday Morning, in an interview Consequence reported on October 19, 2026. The Spanish singer spent two years on Lux, her fourth album, and said that replaying it would be “torture”. She can still hear where the violins could sit higher and which vocal take she might have redone.

Two years, and a deadline that ended the work

Correspondent Seth Doane met the 34-year-old singer at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, after the global tour for Lux. Asked whether she can enjoy her own record, she answered: “I never listen to my albums. ‘Cause it’s pointless.” Doane pointed out that she had made it herself. “I create to share it, to let it go,” she replied. “Why would I listen it back? That would be torture!”

The reason, as she tells it, is that she would only reopen decisions already made. She described herself as a perfectionist, and CBS reports that she kept making tweaks so close to the deadline that the digital version and the vinyl differ slightly. She says the work only ended because she made it end. “I couldn’t do this for too long, because otherwise it would be interminable,” she said. “Like, I can be forever doing it.”

She also listed what she would still change: “The mix, the violins here, they could be half a dB up. Or my voice here, I could have done another take.”

Half a decibel is a detail she can name and few listeners could. The audience gets the finished object, and the maker walks away from it.

The work behind a record in 14 languages

The scale of that work is not a figure of speech. In a Remezcla interview published in November 2025, Rosalía said the arrangements alone took almost a year, “many hours at the piano, refining everything”, and called the project “the hardest [challenge] of my life”. Lux tells the stories of female saints and mystics, one per song, and she pinned a world map to her bedroom wall to place each of them: where each woman came from, what language she spoke, what her story was.

Lyrics in 14 languages followed. Spanish and Catalan come naturally to her, so she wrote in those first. When a translation did not rhyme or scan, she sent back twenty versions, “similar but not the same”, until one worked phonetically and metrically. “It was like solving a puzzle,” she told Remezcla. The song “Jeanne”, inspired by Joan of Arc, is sung in French.

On CBS she put the number in her own terms. “If you find 14 languages in this album, it’s not from a place of exhibition, but a search for communion,” she said. She told the network that the tour has been more demanding than any she has done: she performs en pointe, in ballet shoes, and sings in Japanese, Ukrainian, Catalan and Arabic.

Her stage work in the United States has been covered already in our pages, from her en pointe performance on Saturday Night Live to the U2 song written about her. This interview adds the part nobody sees.

Who pays for an album that is not built for the charts

CBS asked directly whether she thinks about the commercial side of an album like this. Her answer split in two. “On one side, there’s the responsibility of, okay, I have an office and there’s people that I care about,” she said. “But at the same time, I only can do what’s honest for me. It took me two years to make this album.”

The market answered anyway. According to CBS, Lux reached No. 4 on the Billboard 200 and topped the US Latin chart. The anticipation was such that, in the network’s account, a countdown to announce the album snarled traffic in Madrid. A four-part symphonic structure, choirs and the London Symphony Orchestra do not make the usual pop formula, and Rosalía conceded it: “Yes, it’s true,” she laughed. “But I don’t think I ever do.”

She does not frame the choice as a gamble. Her formula for it is closer to a trade. “Being a musician is, for me, an office as noble as somebody who makes bread or shoes,” she said. “So, I just go to the studio and try to put my love and my energy.” And the work, she added, comes “out of devotion”.

Remezcla recorded a similar admission last November. She told the outlet that she had no idea which shelf the record belongs on in a store: “I’d rather let others decide where it belongs when they hear it.”

From a talent-show exit to the Met

The habit has a history she tells herself. Born Rosalía Vila Tobella near Barcelona, she was dropped from the Spanish talent show “Tú Sí Que Vales” when she was 15. “That experience taught me that I had to prepare a lot,” she told CBS. “It really helped me grow. I’m very grateful for that.”

Preparation then took a precise form. At 16 she began studying with the flamenco teacher José Miguel “El Chiqui” Vizcaya, who, in the words quoted in the WSJ. Magazine profile, would send her pieces and say: “Transcribe this, learn these articulations, learn these runs, and next week you will sing it in front of me.”

Her first album, Los Ángeles (2017), was a modern twist on the flamenco she had spent years studying in music school, according to CBS. Motomami (2022) fused rap and reggaeton and topped several album-of-the-year lists. By 2021 Pitchfork had put her on its list of the most important artists of the last 25 years.

Lux turned away from that. Remezcla framed it as the antithesis of Motomami: less interested in fitting in than in standing out. A listener who wanted a repeat of the dancefloor record got an orchestra and a choir, and a singer who had already moved on.

A trait with a literature, and where it stops

Perfectionism is one of the better-studied traits in psychology, and one study speaks to the pressure around it. In a meta-analysis in Psychological Bulletin (2019), Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill pooled 164 samples covering 41,641 American, Canadian and British college students, who completed the same perfectionism scale between 1989 and 2016. Self-oriented perfectionism, the demand people place on themselves, rose over that period. So did socially prescribed perfectionism, the sense that others demand more of you, and other-oriented perfectionism, the demand placed on others.

The authors tie the rise to competitive individualism in the three countries. They note that recent generations of young people perceive that others are more demanding of them, and are more demanding of themselves.

The study does not say anything about Rosalía, or about artists. Its samples were students with a mean age of 20.66, 70.92% of them women, in three English-speaking countries, and it measures a trait on a questionnaire, not a working method. What it offers is context: the habit of judging one’s own finished work against an unreachable standard is common, and a singer who says plainly that she walks away from the mix is describing one way of living with it.

Her own account points to a limit as well.

She stops because the work could go on indefinitely, not because it is perfect, and the stopping point is a deadline.

Where the record goes next

Lux is not finished circulating. Last week Rosalía played “Reliquia” and “Magnolias” on Saturday Night Live and appeared on The Tonight Show, according to Consequence. On October 12, 2026, Irish band Fontaines D.C. released “Where Is Gone?”, a ballad on which she trades lines with singer Grian Chatten. Rolling Stone reports it is the first artist collaboration on a Fontaines D.C. album, and that the record, Dopamine Chamber, was due on October 16.

Guitarist Carlos O’Connell said in the band’s statement: “I’ve been a fan of Rosalía since her debut album, which was absolutely beautiful.” He added that she keeps a Spanish musical tradition alive, which felt to him akin to what the band has tried to do with Irish music.

The next dated step is a ceremony. WSJ. Magazine has named her its 2026 Innovator in Music, one of seven honourees, and its Innovator Awards ceremony is scheduled for October 29 in New York City. We could not open the magazine’s own profile, so what follows comes from a summary by Eric Alper, a music publicist. In it, Sony Music chairman Rob Stringer says of her: “Nothing is too highbrow for her, and nothing is too popular.”

The same summary quotes Rosalía on the money behind her early work. In 2018 she was “en números rojos”, in the red, and her mother was helping her. She persuaded the production company Canada to fund music videos by promising a record deal would repay them. Her own summary of that period is four words long: “I always find a way.”

Sources

• Rosalía on “Lux” and her devotion to music, CBS News
• Perfectionism is increasing over time, Curran and Hill, Psychological Bulletin