Songfacts®:

• Many fans assume "Berghain" nods to the legendary Berlin techno nightclub of the same name. The name itself is a mash-up of two Berlin neighborhoods, Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain, but Rosalía leaned into its literal German meaning: "mountain grove."
  
  "We all have this forest of thoughts inside us where you could get lost," she told The Guardian. "I'm not glorifying evil, but darkness is present in life."
  
  She expanded on the idea with a quote she really likes: "The artist who walks beside the devil, putting a hand on his shoulder, can expand our understanding of wickedness."
  
  Rosalia totally agrees. "Sometimes, when you put opposites beside each other, you can understand both better," she said.
• Rosalía once turned a motorcycle engine into a flamenco beat on "Saoko," and on "Berghain" she turns her classically trained soprano toward something altogether grander. The song, which features Björk and American music producer Yves Tumor, is an operatic meditation on love, sex, fear, and God, basically all the things that get discussed at 5 a.m. in the Berghain smoking area.
• "Berghain" opens with a choir intoning a lament in German, as if Bach himself had wandered into the DJ booth. They're backed by The London Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Daníel Bjarnason, with Baroque strings fluttering against electronic noise, creating a kind of futuristic requiem, one foot in Vivaldi, the other in the void.
  
  Then Rosalía arrives, also in German, her voice stately and strange, before she slips back into her native Spanish for a verse. Translated into English she sings:
  
  I know very well what I am
  Tenderness for coffee
  I'm just a sugar cube.
  
  That "sugar cube" line doubles as a wink to Björk, who began her career with the Icelandic band The Sugarcubes.
• Björk and Yves Tumor offer two sides of humanity's eternal tension: Björk's divine intervention versus Tumor's sensual temptation. It's heaven and flesh, faith and chaos, the same tug-of-war Rosalía's been fighting since she first fused flamenco with trap beats.
• Rosalía and Björk first crossed paths in 2017 through Spanish producer El Guincho, the same man behind many of Rosalia's early hits, including "Con Altura" and "Chicken Teriyaki." "Berghain" is Rosalia's second collaboration with Björk, following the 2023 song "Oral."
  
  Yves Tumor joins Rosalía's universe for the first time, completing a triangle of artists who treat genre as a polite suggestion rather than a rule.
• Rosalia and Bjork wrote "Berghain" with Noah Goldstein, Sir Dylan (Dylan Wiggins), and Jake Miller. American producers Noah Goldstein and Sir Dylan helped sculpt Rosalia's Motomami hits "La Fama," "Saoko" and "Despechá." Florida singer, rapper and songwriter Jake Miller also worked with Rosalia on her joint track with Rauw Alejandro, "Vampiros."
• The music video, shot in Warsaw, begins with Rosalía moving through everyday life trailed by an orchestra. When she returns to her apartment at the end of the day it's filled with wild animals. It was directed by Nicolás Méndez of the Barcelona-based production company Canada, with whom the singer had previously collaborated on the videos for 2018 singles "Malamente" and "Pienso en tu mirá."
• "Berghain" was released as the lead single from Lux, Rosalia's fourth album. The Spanish singer reportedly spent two years learning how to write and sing convincingly in other languages for the album; she sings in 13 different languages across the record.
  
  Lux is Latin for light. "There had to be passages that were darker in order for the light to be even brighter," Rosalia noted of "Berghain."
  
• Lux became the highest-charting album ever by a Spanish female artist in the UK when it debuted on the UK Albums Chart at #4.
• The Guardian ranked "Berghain" their Best Song of 2025. They wrote:
  
  "The towering, gothic Berghain subsumes the listener in the same way the doomed relationship Rosalía sings about is swallowing her: being overwhelmed by a lover's fear, anger, love and blood, dissolving like sugar in hot coffee when he's around."
• Several major outlets and critics' lists placed Lux at #1 on their 2025 album-of-the-year rankings. They include NPR Music, The Guardian, BBC and Dazed. It was ranked the overall album of the year in an aggregated Top 50 compiled from almost 100 of those lists.
• Fifteen of the 18 tracks on Lux draw inspiration from the lives and writings of female saints and mystics, a concept that influenced Rosalía to perform the project in multiple languages to reflect the historical and cultural origins of the figures she explores.
  
  "Berghain" was inspired by Hildegard of Bingen, the German Benedictine abbess, composer, and visionary writer known for her vivid descriptions of spiritual revelations. Rosalía performs portions of the song in German as a direct nod to Hildegard's homeland and writings.
  
  The track lyrically mirrors Hildegard's famous accounts of experiencing divine visions as overwhelming bursts of light and fire. Hildegard once described a radiant, supernatural flame entering her mind, a passage Rosalía reimagines in the line "Die Flamme dringt in mein Gehirn ein" ("The flame penetrates my brain").