Review of the Week: Rosalía at the O2

The O2 Arena, London, 5 May

I am not religious, but I would repent for my sins every night if it meant getting to see Rosalía’s Lux tour again. For an album sung in 13 languages, blending experimental electronic beats with bombastic orchestral arrangements and inspired by a multifaith range of saints and mystics, the show was never going to be straightforward. The classically-trained Catalan artist became a global superstar with her flamenco-reggaeton hybrids on 2022’s Motomami but her fourth release, Lux, released last year, went another way, taking a scythe to low- and high-brow artforms and yet breaking streaming records – an avant-garde anomaly in a soup of identikit pop slop. 

Live, on the London pitstop of a mammoth 2026 run, Rosalía conquers even more creative mediums over four “acts” in a jaw-dropping feat of ballet, contemporary dance, musicals, mime and comedy. She takes us to church, confession and club, to the theatre and inside the museum, across scenes that suggest some kind of bionic assistance: she dances en pointe in a tutu, does the splits, sings in a painting like the Mona Lisa and enacts a cabaret skit involving white gloved hands hovering over her washboard abs (the motivation I needed to reactivate my gym membership). We’re sort of running out of threats after the triple: this year Rosalía also made her TV acting debut in the hit series Euphoria.

The irony is, Rosalía had always dreamed of playing another, traditionally classical, London venue. During the show, she repeats a story from her 2022 tour (please forgive me, O Lord, for I have linked to the Telegraph) about her “fixation” with playing the Royal Albert Hall, only to fill the O2 instead. This time, she’s playing two sold-out shows here and has turned the venue into her own opera house. The 22-piece Heritage Orchestra faces the stage, playing from the audience at bracing volume and directed by the most exciting conductor I’ve ever seen, Cuba’s Yudania Gómez Heredia, while French dance collective (La) Horde encircle Rosalía for some elite-level choreography. English translations of the lyrics flash overhead, but are unnecessary: it’s a gig where it’s a bit embarrassing not to know any Spanish.

Rosalía’s shows have always been a spectacle: celebrating her 2018 breakthrough El Mal Querer in Madrid she wheeled a quad bike onstage and for the live version of 2022’s punchy Motomami, dancers in light-up helmets formed a human motorbike. Lux is obviously another vehicle entirely and the references come thick and fast, from her Madonna-echoing pink quilted bra to the baroque Marie Antoinette wig she wears during a Motomami medley. Angels and demons, saints and sinners and virgin/whore complexes are all present and accounted for, exploring Lux’s theme of duality. At first, it’s Swan Lake meets Night at the Museum, as a box carrying precious cargo falls open to reveal Rosalía as principal ballerina. Then the scene morphs in act two, resembling Goya’s 1798 painting El Aquelarre (The Witches’ Sabbath): she’s now a temptress leading the album’s first single, Berghain, to its full potential, with the gothic operatic overture dropping into a techno version. The party vibe continues during the “intermezzo” for ravey versions of Dios es un Stalker and Motomami’s CUUUUuuuuuute, in case anyone was worrying they wouldn’t get their steps in.

For all the showstoppers, however, some of the strongest moments are the more intimate ones where it’s just Rosalía and her 20,000 fans. Her voice is so startlingly powerful, the emotion so charged, that the arena could quite happily watch her alone at the mic for two hours. In places, she cracks jokes, ad-libs with the front row about needing to improve her English, and thanks everyone for showing up. Her acting chops are put to the test when Lola Young joins her in a confession booth to tell us about accidentally shagging an older married man. The only unnecessary breaking of the fourth wall is when Rosalía dedicates one of her more conventional songs, Sauvignon Blanc – delivered atop a grand piano, having swigged a white wine – to the “two best Brits” she knows: her manager Jonathan [Dickins, who also manages Adele] and his best mate Rob. 

Between all the Christian imagery tonight (at one point a flashing Galician incense burner swings overhead instead of a disco ball) is Rosalía’s quest for her own salvation. She likens her journey to stardom to a personal pilgrimage. “I chose this path long ago when I didn’t know what the fuck it means,” she says. “This nomadic life can be chaotic but I would choose it again and again.” It’s teeing us up for one of her biggest triumphs, Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti, a breathtaking aria that she took a year to write, then translated into Italian, and performs now in a white habit, quivering with Maria Callas levels of intensity and on the verge of tears. 

It’s like Patti Smith said in 1976 – now quoted in Rosalía’s power move La Yugular, where the punk high priestess can be heard at the end of act three saying: “Seven heavens? Big deal! I wanna see the eighth heaven, tenth heaven, thousandth heaven… One door isn’t enough, a million doors aren’t enough”. Those words have been interpreted as seeking infinite transcendence, but they’re also about the desire to continually break through new dimensions as an artist. The world is not enough – but for now, it’s Rosalia’s and we’re all just levitating in it.

Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.