Spanish singer Rosalía brings rough and smooth to London’s O2 Arena — review

The atmosphere at the O2 Arena was fervent. There were banners with messages of adoration. Excitement flickered through sections of the audience as Rosalía moved around her stage, which was L-shaped like a giant foldable phone screen. While fans holding real phones shot shaky video footage, a professional cameraman did the same more artfully within inches of her face. Vérité close-ups of the Spaniard singing were projected behind her. Amid the bombastic lighting and drilled choreography of arena spectacle was the spirit of something rawer, a distant tang of spit and sawdust and bared teeth.

Rosalía Vila Tobella, to use her full name, grew up near Barcelona and has a degree from the Catalonia College of Music in flamenco vocal performance. Her first album, 2017’s Los Ángeles, was a guitar-and-voice exercise in updated traditionalism. The following year’s El Mal Querer gave flamenco’s handclapping and ululating cries an electronic pop makeover. It was a big hit across the Spanish-speaking world.

Her latest album, this year’s Motomami, has taken her to a new level of international stardom. Its tracks formed the bulk of her show, which began with the revving vroom of motorbike engines. The singer entered with a troupe of eight dancers, all wearing lit-up motorcycle helmets. Rosalía removed hers with the slow flourish of a gladiator. A growling bassline and punchy pattern of beats kicked in. “I transform myself,” she sang in Spanish. Distorted reggaeton with a jazz piano breakdown, marked by a passage of twerking from the singer, underlined the attention-grabbing extent of the change.

Leaving tyre tracks on her classicist past, Motomami is a full-throttle tour through modern pop and Latin dance styles. The show’s brash opening track “Saoko” was followed by “Candy”, a soft ballad sung by Rosalía in breathy high tones rather than the vibrato inflections of her flamenco voice. Then came “Bizcochito” with TikTok-friendly electronic jingles and clipped formation dance moves. Next track “La Fama” shimmied into a dance genre originally from the Dominican Republic called bachata. The backing dancers sat nearby and watched as though already needing a breather.

A black dress with a surreally long train was attached to her for “De plata”, a rare foray into her back catalogue during which she howled a striking flamenco vocal over rough electric guitar drones. Otherwise she wore the same outfit, an elaborate Rosalían fantasy of biker clothes. Stylised poses coexisted with natural-seeming displays of warmth. She wiped her face on a towel between songs, removing make-up so as to appear ever more fresh-faced. At one point, she scissored off her hair extensions and threw them into the audience.

The deliberate friction between slick pop stagecraft and unvarnished feeling was artfully done. It could have been heightened by a greater use of live music alongside the preprogrammed beats and basslines. But the singer gave vivid form to this tension, sometimes fluting her vocal through computer-processed effects, other times projecting herself forcefully as though with every sinew of her being. Her bravura rendition of “Sakura” near the end, with a musician playing electric piano, was the highlight, a torch song that outshone the O2 Arena’s mega-wattage of stage lighting.

★★★★☆

rosalia.com