El Mal Querer, Rosalía's second album, arrived on Thursday (November 8) and is described by Pitchfork as a remarkable feat, seamlessly linking flamenco's characteristic melodrama to the heart-wrenching storytelling of modern R&B.

The review starts from a broader question: as the internet homogenises individual music cultures into a big studio-quantised mishmash, how do musicians retain the singularity of hyper-local, often dissipating histories?

Rosalía's answer, according to the review, is to update the tradition without emptying it. El Mal Querer earned its acclaim for that combination of the local and the global, turning flamenco into pop material without losing its roots.