From there, it transitions into this choral-esque hook that reminds me of Christmas in the best way possible - twinkling and transcendent, in a particularly venerable way. “DE AQUÍ NO SALES,” (Cap.4: Disputa) exudes pure energy with growling, motorcycle-revving samples that eventually melt into frenetic handclaps, and insane chopped-up vocalization.īut the most revelatory moment of the album for me is chapter seven, “ BAGDAD.” She opens up with a distorted interpolation of Justin Timberlake’s “Cry Me A River” sung in Spanish, which took me by surprise. The ringing line of the track, “Pienso en tu mirá, clavá, es una bala en el pecho,” (roughly, “your gaze is a bullet in the chest”) gets visually translated as blood slowly seeping through shirts in the accompanying music video. “PIENSO EN TU MIRÁ” (Cap.3: Celos), is simultaneously delicate and biting with its languid synth work and rhythmic clapping. The album closer is titled “A Ningun Hombre” and opens with the lyric “I won’t allow any man to dictate my sentence.”įrom prologue to finale, we get to hear the full versatility of Rosalía’s musical imagination. Rosalía’s retelling ends on a similarly defiant edge. She eventually escapes by manipulating her way into the good graces of another man, while simultaneously lying to her husband. The narrative draws from the 13th century manuscript, Flamenca, which tells the story of a woman whose jealous husband imprisons her in a tower when he believes her to be cheating. In an interview with Jezebel’s The Muse, Rosalía explains that the album’s concept originally served as her university thesis. The narrative arc is shaped like a “u”, opening with a dark omen (Cap.1), then dipping into conflict (Cap.4), before a sharp ascent into sanity (Cap.10) and landing on a meditation on power (Cap.11). On El Mal Querer, each song is given a capitulo, or chapter, and the project, as a whole, forms a book: The Bad Love. Her newest project builds upon that experimentation and is of near epic proportions, with a full narrative arc behind the album’s 11 tracks. It has since served as the rich foundation for everything she’s created. She fell in love with the traditional art form at 13, when she first heard revivalist Camarón de la Isla blasting from a car near her school in Catalonia. That project introduced her to the world as a hybridizer of modern pop sounds - 808s and electronic synth work - and flamenco. It follows 2017’s Los Ángeles (as in “the Angels”, not the city), her first officially released collection of music.

El Mal Querer is the Spanish nuevo-flamenco star’s second album, which she released with Sony on Friday.

Rosalia de aqui no sales lyrics