With a towering new album about female saints in 13 languages, she’s pop’s boldest star – and one of its most controversial. She revisits her spiritual breakthroughs, and explains why we need forgiveness instead of cancel culture

Rosalía Vila Tobella is just as bored as you are of pop music functioning as gossip column fodder, with lyrics full of hints of rivalries and betrayal. “I’m tiring of seeing people referencing celebrities, and celebrities referencing other celebrities,” she says. “I’m really much more excited about saints.”

The 33-year-old Catalan musician and producer’s monumental fourth album, Lux, draws on the lives of dozens of female saints, inspired by “feminine mysticism, spirituality” and how lives of murder, materialism and rebellion could light the way to canonisation. Rosalía reels them off. Her gothic, operatic new single Berghain borrows from the 12th-century German abbess Hildegard of Bingen (cited like Madonna these days by experimental female musicians). “She had these visions that would pierce her brain. There’s also Vimala, who wrote poetry but was a prostitute, and she ended up becoming a saint because she was one of the first women who wrote in the Therīgāthā,” an ancient Buddhist poem collection written by nuns.

The Catalan star’s epic new single is delighting and dividing classical music fans in equal measure

The Top 10 of today’s Spotify Global Top 50 looks like business as usual: two Taylor Swift songs; Lady Gaga and Bruno Mars’ Die With a Smile hanging around for an eighth month; the eminently normal male pop stars Sombr and Alex Warren doing brisk business.

But nestled among the crowd-pleasers is something of an outlier: a gothic, baroque assault powered by Vivaldi-style strings and operatic singing in German and Spanish.