Rosalía, where do you even begin? With the musician who co produces everything herself? With the training that turned a very good singer into an artist who knows exactly what she is doing? With the nerve it took to tear everything apart again on MOTOMAMI in 2022 and reassemble it from scratch? Or with LUX in 2025, that orchestral project with the London Symphony Orchestra? You could begin anywhere. But the right place to start is El Mal Querer. The album that grew out of her final project, is loosely based on the Occitan Flamenca, and has stood there since 2018 like a benchmark of its own.
Context, appropriation, and what came before
My own relationship to flamenco is strongly shaped by the Spanish side of my family, which comes from Jerez, where flamenco and Camarón were simply part of the background from the very beginning. With Rosalía, it was different. That makes it all the more remarkable how deeply she worked her way into this music. El Mal Querer makes it very clear that you do not have to come from Andalusia to do more than quote flamenco, to really understand it. That in itself is already an answer to those who too quickly accuse her of cultural appropriation.
That is also why Los Ángeles matters so much as a prehistory. Her debut with Raül Refree is often treated as little more than a preliminary step, when in fact it is the condition that makes the freedom of El Mal Querer possible. Los Ángeles is austere, reduced, almost demonstratively pure. Voice, guitar, discipline. Rosalía first shows that she can carry the material without any large production architecture around it. That is why El Mal Querer does not feel like a calculated jump into something more ambitious, but like the logical next step.
And this is also where Camarón comes in. The most useful historical comparison for me is not just any concept album, but La leyenda del tiempo from 1979. Not because Rosalía sounds like Camarón. That would be far too simple. But because both arrive at a similar point. They take a music that outsiders like to treat as if it had to be kept under glass. La leyenda del tiempo caused a shock at the time that feels, in its impact, closer to Bob Dylan’s electrified Newport moment than to an ordinary stylistic shift. With Dylan, it was Newport in 1965. With Camarón, it was this album. In both cases, part of the audience reacted as if something more than novelty had happened, as if there had been a betrayal.
At the same time, Rosalía should not be told too smoothly. The debate around cultural appropriation belongs in any serious discussion of her. She was accused, as a Catalan artist, of working with an art form, a symbolism, and a visual language closely tied to Andalusia and specifically to Gitano traditions. That is not some side issue or Twitter noise you politely wave away. You can find this album extraordinary and still acknowledge that it exists in a real tension.
Eleven chapters, one musical architecture
What separates El Mal Querer from merely well intentioned concept art from the very beginning is its internal coherence. Eleven songs, eleven chapters: Augury, Wedding, Jealousy, Dispute, Lament, Closure, Liturgy, Ecstasy, Conception, Sanity, Power.
When it comes to the musical details, I lean in several places on Jaime Altozano’s analysis, because he brings out something that still gets far too little attention in many texts about El Mal Querer: the music itself.
Malamente (Chapter 1: Augury): The beat sounds as if it was born from wood, as if someone were knocking it out on the edge of a table or on a cajón, only now dressed in the clothing of trap. That is already strong. It gets even better in the chorus. There is that one low effect tone on F under the C minor loop that shifts the entire harmony. Something that could have been static suddenly becomes weightless, almost slightly bluesy. The song does not just stick, it breathes. Then there is Rosalía’s melody with its small frictions. Malamente is not only a hit but a warning. The title of the chapter says it all. The song senses from the start that something is going to go wrong.
Que no salga la luna (Chapter 2: Wedding): becomes even more claustrophobic. The piece is deeply rooted in a bulería world, but produced in a modern way. The guitar and palmas at the beginning run through a low pass, as if they were coming from another room, while Rosalía’s voice stays very close to the front. At the core, only two chords circle around each other, and Jaime is right to hear something of Chopin’s Funeral March in them. Not as a hard reference, more as a very precise listening association.
Pienso en tu mirá (Chapter 3: Jealousy): is one of the biggest moments on the album for me. I still find it absurd that this beat never feels crooked, even though the end contains that clipped chorus, and later everyone in a stadium can still sing along without having to count. That is exactly where its greatness lies. Underneath the song is a flamenco compás with its twelve beat structure, and then the chorus keeps getting trimmed back. Jaime calls it a bonsai chorus, and it is hard to put it better. Added to that are cajón, electric organ, children’s choir, and that widened bed of voices under Rosalía’s lead.
De aquí no sales (Chapter 4: Dispute): then makes it clear that this album has no interest in remaining pretty. Motorcycles, engines, brakes, sirens, distorted voices, auto tune not as gloss but as damage. Violence is not described here or aesthetically softened, but translated into sound. That is one of the greatest strengths of El Mal Querer. The production does not merely illustrate, it acts. It does not comment on the escalation from the outside, it becomes part of it.
Reniego (Chapter 5: Lament): then pulls the air out noticeably. That is exactly why the song works so well. After the escalation, what comes is not some blunt calm but an internal aftershock. And then suddenly an orchestra. Recorded, with the Bratislava Symphony Orchestra. That is exactly what makes Reniego so strong. An album that until then has worked with reduction, bodily rhythm, and deliberate emptiness suddenly allows itself symphonic space without losing its logic.
Preso (Chapter 6: Closure): is one of those tracks where the album suddenly comes to a halt. Rossy de Palma, the Spanish actress many people know above all from Pedro Almodóvar’s films, speaks here about pain, children, and a relationship that damages you so deeply that it cannot simply be erased from your life. No singing, no evasive gesture, just this voice and this text.
Bagdad (Chapter 7: Liturgy): is based on Cry Me a River by Justin Timberlake. The fact that Timberlake appears in the credits feels here almost like a polite gesture on Rosalía’s part, because the song does not stay in a recognizable state for very long. Yes, at the beginning the melody is there one to one. But Rosalía and El Guincho do not use it as a nostalgic aha moment, but as raw material. They change its weight, its atmosphere, its entire character. Something everyone knows becomes, very quickly, something that belongs only to this album.
Di mi nombre (Chapter 8: Ecstasy): suddenly brings in movement, body, and desire. Under the surface runs the Andalusian cadence. After all the constriction before it, this does not feel like simple liberation, but like a different state within the same story.
Nana (Chapter 9: Conception): works almost entirely through voice. Rosalía does not use the vocoder here as an effect to show off with, but to turn one voice into several. What emerges is something between lullaby and artificial choir. It also reminds me strongly of Jacob Collier’s vocoder work, only far more reduced, darker, and without any playful excess. The track is almost empty and still never sounds small.
Maldición (Chapter 10: Sanity): is probably one of my favorite moments on the whole album. It begins with an arpeggio that resists any neat categorization. It has something of Bach about it, floating, almost as if the song were pulling the tonal ground away for a moment.
A ningún hombre (Chapter 11: Power): is not just a strong ending, but the whole point of the album. After all the gaze regime, the control, the confinement, the psychological abrasion, what arrives is no kitschy triumph, no flat empowerment slogan, but this: a voice that does not pretend to have remained untouched, but rises precisely through the memory of what was done to it. No false happy ending, then, but a form of strength that does not erase the pain, only survives it.
A benchmark of its own
And that is why El Mal Querer remains the reference work for me. Not because MOTOMAMI is weaker or LUX less daring. But because this is the first time everything fully locks together: Los Ángeles as necessary prehistory, Camarón as historical shadow, El Guincho as the ideal counterpart in production, the Flamenca structure as narrative framework, pop intelligence, rhythm, friction, all that precision. Or more simply: there are albums that impress you. And then there are albums that seem to arrive with their own benchmark already built in. El Mal Querer belongs in the second category.
And the fact that this album later showed up not only in year end lists, but also in decade and all time canons, now looks less like hype than like the only possible outcome.
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