Rosalía

She was thirteen, in that park full of parked cars, when a friend put on Camarón de la Isla. "Me explotó la cabeza," she told the newspaper El Mundo — my head exploded. With no family tradition to lean on, she taught herself: flamenco dance classes first, then his 1970s albums with guitarist Paco de Lucía on repeat, before years of formal cante training. The afternoon reset what she wanted from a life in music. By 2018 she was reworking his most reviled rupture, the moment he set flamenco singing against rock instrumentation and scandalized purists, into her own version of the same risk.

listen: upstream & hereshare

1981

Como el Agua (Tangos)Camarón de la Isla

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2018

Que No Salga la LunaRosalía

listen forOn "Como el Agua," cut with Paco de Lucía in 1981, Camarón sings one unaccompanied line — "Limpia va el agua del río" — with a clarity critics still call radical. Rosalía's "Que No Salga la Luna" opens like a flamenco bulería: shouted vocals, fierce guitar, spattering handclaps. Then, as The Atlantic put it, that opening "travels down an electronic tunnel, gets swallowed, and becomes a muffled pulse" — the acoustic tradition doesn't vanish, it gets absorbed into the production, the way Camarón once absorbed rock.

One twentieth-century cantaora sits above nearly everyone else in Rosalía's listening: "La Niña de los Peines, who is one of my biggest references," she told Pitchfork in 2022, admitting the old 78s took time to love — "her records sound so bad because it comes from long ago." Her teacher, José Miguel Vizcaya, later told The New York Times Magazine that Rosalía once planned a full tribute album to Pastora Pavón Cruz, the singer's given name, before choosing to build something newer instead — a debut, Los Ángeles, whose songs still drew on Pavón's 1940s-50s repertoire.

listen: upstream & heresource: The New York Times Magazine — Rosalía's Incredible Journey From Flamenco to Megastardom (Camarón, La Niña de los Peines, El Guincho, bio) ↗share

1930

PeteneraLa Niña de los Peines

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2017

De PlataRosalía

listen forNo single Los Ángeles track covers a specific La Niña de los Peines recording — the album borrows an era and a texture, not a song. On "Petenera," one of Pavón's signature pieces, listen for the bare, unornamented voice pushed right up against the sound of her own breath. Rosalía and producer Raül Refree chased that same rawness on "De Plata": voice first, minimal guitar, nothing sanded smooth — the preference the two of them chose over the huskier tone flamenco purists usually favor.

El Guincho, the producer Pablo Díaz-Reixa, had never touched a Phrygian scale before Rosalía brought him to a flamenco show in 2016 and then into the studio for El mal querer. They spent a year and a half working nearly every day out of his place, laptops and one microphone between them. "The way Pablo is is very special, because Pablo really listens a lot," she told The New York Times Magazine. The trade ran both directions: she taught him flamenco, and — per that same reporting — he taught her song structure and helped refine her lyrics, until they were building tracks like "Malamente" together from the ground up.

listen: upstream & heresource: The New York Times Magazine — Rosalía's Incredible Journey From Flamenco to Megastardom (Camarón, La Niña de los Peines, El Guincho, bio) ↗share

2010

BombayEl Guincho

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2018

MalamenteRosalía

listen forEl Guincho's "Bombay," off his 2010 album Pop Negro, stacks chopped vocal samples and drum hits into one dense, maximalist wall — his signature before Rosalía ever walked into his studio. "Malamente" runs the same trick on her own voice: handclaps, a horn stab, and her cante chopped into rhythmic fragments, all built with the same sample-and-loop logic. It reads less like a shared melody than a shared production instinct, density over space, carried straight from his solo records into hers.