Rosalía is back and ready for a new album to release. She has returned with her lead single, “Berghain”, with a new musical direction and a multilingual song. Classically trained Rosalía has teamed up with the London Symphony Orchestra, Björk, and Yves Tumour for a haunting track full of dramatic strings, daunting operatic vocals, and multilingual singing.
The song begins with frantic violins and other string instruments, leading into dramatic operatic vocals from a German choir. Rosalía begins the song in German, singing opera-style for the first two verses before switching to Spanish. Her verses are accompanied by a dramatic and intense string orchestra and choir singing in German. Björk begins singing during the second chorus, culminating in the haunting bridge about divine intervention emphasised through the layers of shifting vocals.
The song ends with the outro of Yves Tumor desperately repeating “I’ll fuck you ’til you love me,” evoking a deep sense of longing. The lyrics of the song induce a sense of drama and anxiety combined with the fast-tempo strings and desperate subject matter. The Spanish lyrics, in particular, bring a sense of vulnerability to the listener, where she compares herself to a melting sugar cube in the presence of the subject of the song.
With her heavy use of classical instrumentation and opera vocals, Rosalía has branched out from her sound in her older projects like Motomami and El Mal Querer, which primarily lean into the genres of reggaeton, flamenco, neoperreo, electronic and art pop. For this song and her upcoming album, she is leaning into a more intense production style and working with the London Symphony Orchestra for the upcoming album. Rosalía talked to the New York Times popcast about her upcoming album, which features Berghain as “a maximalist project with a brutalist intention to it, while Motomami was more minimalist.”
The popularity of the song could potentially usher in a new wave of classical-inspired pop music. However, if it does not shift the general public’s taste, the song will undoubtedly become a cult classic amongst those who enjoyed Rosalía’s experimental productions.
