Rosalía Sings on Pointe: 'Reliquia' and 'Magnolias' Hit SNL

Rosalía performed "Reliquia" and "Magnolias" from her album Lux on Saturday Night Live this weekend, delivering one song on pointe and the other in artificial rain.

For "Reliquia," the Spanish singer-songwriter appeared to sing the entire song while balanced on her toes, with shadows of orchestral musicians cast on a white curtain behind her. She trained with a professional ballerina to prepare the choreography for her Lux tour.

"Magnolias," the 18th and final track on Lux, she sang in the rain, dressed in white against a dark backdrop.

How did the album land with critics?

Rolling Stone gave Lux a five-star review, writing that it "sounds like absolutely nothing else in music right now, and it's an album no other pop star could have made." The magazine called it her "most astonishing offer yet" after 2022's Motomami and El Mal Querer four years earlier — "packed with history and decades of training that let her tie classical sounds, opera references, and 14 different languages into one gorgeous, gutting package that feels like a truly timeless work of art."

Released last November, Lux topped charts in several countries, including three Billboard U.S. rankings: Top Classical Albums, Top Latin Albums, and World Albums.

What is Lux about?

The hour-long, four-movement album, Rosalía said in a press release announcing it last year, is "a widescreen emotional arc of feminine mystique, transformation, and spirituality—moving between intimacy and operatic scale to create a radiant world where sound, language, and culture fuse as one."

The 34-year-old artist told Billboard the songs grew out of learning about saints. "Because my background is Catholic from my family, so you understand it through this one [lens]," she said. "But then you realize that in other cultures and other religious contexts, it's another thing. But what surprised me a lot was that there's a main theme, which is not fearing, which you can find shared across many religions."

She added: "And I think that's so powerful because probably the fears that I have, somebody on the other side of the world has the same ones. And for me, there's beauty in that, in understanding that we might think that we're different, but we're not."

What comes next?

Rosalía has just wrapped her Lux Tour and has no new dates scheduled. She may next take the stage in the coming weeks at the Billboard Latin Music Awards and the Latin Grammys, where Lux holds pending nominations.