The 29-year-old singer Rosalía from near Barcelona is – next to Dua Lipa – currently the most successful European pop singer in the world.

It is considered the Iberian answer to Björk and Beyoncé at the same time.

For her, avant-garde and commerce are not contradictory.

With her solo releases and her collaborations with stars like The Weeknd, James Blake, Travis Scott or J Balvin, she has achieved billions of clicks and streams in recent years.

Among the few Spanish-speaking pop stars to achieve global fame, Rosalía has stood out for deconstructing and reassembling trademark Iberian culture.

Flamenco sounds were taken apart and interwoven with the rhythms of the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and urban pop.

In her innovative music videos, she combined the visual worlds of Pablo Almodóvar, surrealism and bull riding with the meme culture of the internet.

Rosalía belongs to a generation in which musical barriers have largely dissolved and genres coexist.

But when everything is in flux, what makes the difference?

In her case, it is above all her voice that is unparalleled in today's pop landscape and could not be created digitally by any producer team in the world.

Rosalía's vocal skill is the result of highly concentrated work and many years of music study.

Her role model is Camarón de la Isla, a Roma from Andalusia who was considered one of the first superstars of flamenco.

The singer is from Catalonia in northern Spain.

Her classmates and friends there were children of Andalusian workers who introduced her to flamenco when she was thirteen.

She was so fascinated by the music of Camarón de la Isla that she began studying flamenco singing and piano.

At the age of nineteen she was accepted at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya to study for four years with José Miguel Vizcaya, a legendary flamenco teacher who admits only one student a year to the school.

Flamenco, urban sounds and pop

She began performing in bars and at weddings to gain her first live experience and showcase her skills.

When she was 22, she recorded her first album, Los Angeles.

Released in 2016, it became a smash hit but little noticed outside of the Spanish-speaking world.

In 2017 she started working with producer El Guincho on the album “El Mal Querer” for her music school thesis.

It was released in 2018;

the hit "Malamente" contained therein suddenly made her internationally famous.

More chart hits followed, because on her second album she expanded her flamenco talent with urban sounds and pop.

Polyrhythmic handclaps, wild, melismatic vocals, Phrygian scales—all of these could be heard on “El Mal Querer” but thrown together with trap beats,

For her third album "Motomami", which is out now, Rosalía has now ventured even further artistically.

"Motomami" is an innovative, avant-garde work that leaves the listener with more questions than answers.

Even the title of the album is built like a bulky binomial;

two contrasting forms of energy mark the tension of the album.

"Moto" - the motorcycle, the machine-powered energy - and "Mami", which colloquially means "sweetheart" in Latin American Spanish.

The album's sixteen tracks are a musical illustration of this binomial.

Fragile a cappella pieces alternate with South American and Caribbean rhythms;

James Blake is guest vocalist with a new collaboration,

"Olé!" in the Mickey Mouse pitch

Throughout the album, Rosalía plays with the wide range of her voice;

she pushes the limits to keep weaving the rhythm and the melodies in a new way.

Her music can appear discordant and asymmetrical, but at the same time she always shows a great flair for pop.

There is room for everything on Motomami.

The track "Bulerías" is a good example of how Rosalía's pop metabolism works.

A classic Bulería opener with rousing screams, heavy beating and rhythmic hand clapping travels through an electronic tunnel of effects, is swallowed up and settled into a muffled pulse, like something heard underground or through the wall of a club.

Above that, Rosalía sings elegiacly in semitone serpentines, then the effect suddenly opens up,

Or the album's first track, "Saoko," a tribute to reggaeton pioneer Daddy Yankee.

Just two minutes long, the track starts off like classic reggaeton, but overloaded and distorted, with the hum of a busted organ, a surprising jazz piano break and a lurching finale that builds to a fiery, stuttering crescendo.

The song is an allusion to the currently most successful Latin American pop genre, reggaeton, but also recalls the daring collaboration between the Venezuelan producer Arca and Kanye West, who decided in 2013 to do something completely adventurous musically, far from the expectations of his fans, with "Yeezus". to publish, and celebrated a much greater success with it than with his earlier courtesy rap.

Rosalía followed this idea throughout the album.

"Yo soy muy mía, yo me transformo", she sings on "Saoko": "I am myself, I transform myself."

Rosalía: "Motomami"

(Columbia Records)