Rosalía: the outsider who learned flamenco well enough to leave it behind

Rosalía

Photo: Image Press Agency / Depositphotos

Born	September 25, 1992 Sant Cugat del Vallès
Occupation	Singer-Songwriter
Awards	Latin Grammy for Best Alternative Song u00b7 Latin Grammy for Best Urban Fusion/Performance u00b7 Barcelona City Award

What do you do when the thing you worked hardest to learn is no longer the thing you make? Rosalía does not answer the question directly, but the arc of her work does. She can deploy flamenco the way a trained pianist deploys scales — not as performance, not as genre marker, but as the infrastructure beneath whatever she is building at any given moment. And right now, with the LUX Tour running across arenas in seventeen countries and still not finished, what she is building is the largest production of her life.

She grew up in Sant Cugat del Vallès, a suburb outside Barcelona, in a household with no musical tradition and no connection to Andalusian flamenco. The form found her instead: at thirteen, she encountered recordings of Camarón de la Isla — the Cádiz-born singer who spent his life pulling flamenco’s emotional range toward its outer limits — and understood something in the sound that she could not yet name. Within a few years she was at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya (ESMUC) in Barcelona, competing for the one slot the conservatory opens annually to flamenco singing students. She won it. She graduated in 2017 with a debut album already recorded.

At ESMUC, she studied cante jondo under José Miguel Vizcaya — known as El Chiqui — a teacher whose insistence on technical rigor made no concessions for enthusiasm alone. What the school gave her was not community or lineage but something arguably more transferable: the ability to understand what flamenco was doing, structurally, and why it worked. That understanding would later let her dismantle the form from the inside.

Los Ángeles, made with producer Raül Refree and released in 2017, found an audience of specialists before it found anyone else. It was spare to the point of severity — voice, guitar, almost no ornamentation, the architecture of cante jondo exposed rather than decorated. It was not a crossover record and was not trying to be.

El Mal Querer, released in 2018, was the pivot that changed the order of things. Structured as a concept album around Flamenca, a thirteenth-century Occitan poem about a woman imprisoned by an obsessive husband, it fused flamenco technique with electronic production in ways that felt less like fusion and more like argument — the two forms pulling against each other until something emerged that neither would have produced alone. It won the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year in 2019 and the US Grammy for Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album in 2020. Billboard gave her its Rising Star Award that year and named her the first Spanish-singing act to be nominated for Best New Artist at the US Grammys.

MOTOMAMI, released in 2022, was the decision that most clearly separated her career from the careers of most artists who reach her level. The record could have been El Mal Querer’s successor — more of the same formal rigor, safer ground, a formula that had just won every available prize. Instead it moved into reggaeton structures, dembow rhythms, and fractured pop forms, with a lead single, La Fama, featuring The Weeknd, that had more in common with Latin urban music than with anything she had previously recorded. Some disappointment followed, particularly among the listeners who had found her through flamenco. The Latin Grammy gave it Album of the Year anyway, in 2022. The US Grammy made her the first woman to win Best Latin Rock or Alternative Album twice.

The question of authenticity has followed her since the beginning and has never fully closed. Flamenco is entangled with Romani identity and Andalusian culture in ways that make the question of who gets to perform it genuinely complicated. José Mercé, one of the tradition’s senior figures, stated publicly that while Rosalía sings well, “not everything is valid, and any small thing is not flamenco.” The criticism is not frivolous — she did not grow up inside the tradition; she arrived from outside and learned it structurally, at a conservatory, rather than through the community apprenticeship the form has historically demanded. Her response has been made in music rather than in press statements: she has kept moving, using flamenco as a foundation rather than a destination, which is either a betrayal or its own form of respect, depending entirely on where you stand.

LUX arrived in November 2025 and landed differently than anything in her catalogue. Recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and sung across thirteen languages — Spanish, English, Portuguese, French, Galician, Catalan, Italian, and others — it brought in collaborators including Björk, Estrella Morente, Silvia Pérez Cruz, Carminho, Yahritza, and Yves Tumor. Metacritic gave it a score of 97 out of 100, the highest of 2025 and the fourth-highest score the site has ever recorded. It became the most-streamed album by a female Spanish-language recording artist in history. In early 2026, the Brit Awards named her International Artist of the Year. In April, Billboard named her Woman of the Year at its Latin Women in Music event; she accepted remotely, because she was in the middle of a show.

Her engagement to Puerto Rican singer Rauw Alejandro, announced publicly and ended in July 2023, is the one element of her private life that has surfaced at length in public record. She has said little about it since.

The LUX Tour runs through San Juan in early September 2026, and after it, there is no announced next project. For an artist who has spent a decade consistently making the record no one expected — flamenco to electronic concept album to reggaeton experiment to orchestral opus — the absence of announcement is probably the most reliable signal that something unexpected is already in preparation.

Tags: singers, musicians, Björk, Rosalía, El Mal Querer, flamenco

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