Songfacts®:

• If you've ever wandered through Spain - proper, candle-lit Spain, not the tourist-friendly stretch between the airport and the hotel - you've likely encountered the odd reliquary containing something disconcertingly anatomical. A finger here, a collarbone there. The Catholic tradition calls these "relics," any bodily remains or objects belonging to a person venerated as a saint.
  
  Rosalía leans directly into this baroquely visceral custom in "Reliquia," offering pieces of her heart and identity to be preserved and remembered by others.
• Rosalia took inspiration for "Reliquia" from the Spanish nun and mystic Saint Teresa of Ávila. Upon her death in 1582, her limbs were amputated, divided, and turned into relics after her death, just like her heart, which is still kept preserved at the Monastery of Alba de Tormes (Salamanca).
• The making of "Reliquia" was its own kind of pilgrimage, undertaken by a small crowd of collaborators: Rosalía, her regular producers David Rodríguez, Dylan Wiggins and Noah Goldstein, songwriter and OneRepublic frontman Ryan Tedder (Adele, Tate McRae), violinist and composer Caroline Shaw, and Daft Punk's Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo.
• The orchestral elements include cello and violin from the London Symphony Orchestra, along with choir contributions from L'Escolania De Montserrat and the Cor de Cambra del Palau de la Música Catalana.
• Rosalia recorded "Reliquia" for her fourth album, Lux, which mainly has an acoustic palette. But "Reliquia" surprises by building from gentle orchestration into a kind of digital tectonic shift when synths arrive and distortion floods in. It's ironic how a song about relics ends up being the most technologically forward track on the album.
• The narrative of saintliness continues across Lux, including "Sauvignon Blanc," another song inspired by Saint Teresa of Ávila, in which Rosalía renounces material possessions, including her Jimmy Choos, porcelain and upright piano. In doing so, she emulates the saint's decision to rid herself of all material things as part of her spiritual and ascetic practices.
• Rosalía planned Lux like a four-chapter pilgrimage: departure from purity, gravity and worldliness, grace and nearness to God, and finally the farewell, the return journey home. "Reliquia" is the second track on the first movement, the threshold moment where the relic - that is, the self - decides whether to stay intact or be carried, piece by piece, into the future.