EL MAL QUERER by Rosalia

El Mal Querer, Rosalía's second album and her first of original songs, arrived on 2 November 2018, written by the Spanish singer herself and co-produced with El Guincho on a shoestring while she was still an independent artist. It doubled as her final project at the Catalonia College of Music, where she graduated with honors, surely some of the most ambitious homework ever handed in. The concept comes from Flamenca, an anonymous Occitan novel from the 13th century, retold in chapters as a story of love gone bad.

Musically it's flamenco's melodrama and ache colliding with trap, reggaeton and wide-open pop production, and it sounds like nothing else. "Malamente" and "Pienso en tu mirá" went viral with their videos, the album topped the Spanish charts, and it has spent longer on them than any album in Spanish history. It won the Latin Grammy for Album of the Year, and Rolling Stone later named it the greatest Spanish-language album ever made, 315th overall.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.