FEATURE:
The Best Albums of 2025
ROSALÍA - LUX
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I would be very surprised…
PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Maggio for The New York Times
if this is not named the best album of the year by pretty much every critic come the end of the year. Released on 7th November ROSALÍA’s LUX instantly received these enormously impassioned reviews. Go and buy the album. I think people were surprised because it is so different to 2022’s MOTOMAMI. A lot of reaction came to the fact LUX is more influenced by Classical and Opera than any other genre. It is a big shift for the Spanish artist. Even though MOTOMAMI gained all these ecstatic reviews and was one of the most loved albums of 2022, LUX seems to have exceeded that. I shall come to interviews with ROSALÍA, and I will also sample a several reviews. However, there have been a lot of features and opinion pieces around that question of whether LUX is authentically Classic/Opera. Whether purists are turning their noses up or it is highly strange for a commercial artist to do something like this, I am not sure whether it is flattering or insulting for ROSALÍA. Rather than embrace LUX and commend its sheer scale, ambition and brilliance, there seems to be this critical edge. The New York Times wrote that, whilst LUX borrows from Opera and Classical, it commits to neither:
“Sometimes life feels like opera. You experience passion as if you invented it, and loss as if you may not survive it. There’s a thrill in being the main character, a role the Spanish pop star Rosalía takes on with maximalist commitment in her new album, “Lux.”
Its ambition extravagant, “Lux” was recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daníel Bjarnason and featuring arrangements by the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw.
But how much of the album is really classical music?
That’s not easy to answer, though “Lux” is being advertised as symphonic and operatic. Maybe. These art forms are so open, it’s almost a waste of time to try to say what they are and aren’t. On the most basic level they are mediums of expression, through instruments or the voice, that transcend language.
Yet it wouldn’t be accurate to say that Rosalía has written a modern symphony, as the track list’s “four movements” would suggest. Nor has she written an opera, which is inherently theatrical. She uses both forms to signal extreme scale and feeling, without committing to either. At the end of the day, she has made a pop album with a big budget.
Strangely, Rosalía hasn’t mentioned a form that “Lux” more closely resembles: lieder, or art song, which can contain elements of symphonic music and opera, often with the length of a pop song. When strung together thematically or narratively, they become song cycles like and “Winterreise,” works that could pass for concept albums today.
It’s more difficult to channel opera. Throughout its history, this art form has been expressed with flowing melodies and musicalized speech alike, but in pastiche and pop culture it’s usually depicted with overblown, Italianate passion.
As a shorthand, opera can convey a sense of heightened feeling, which suits Rosalía’s maximalist vision for “Lux.” But that runs the risk of kitsch, even with her vocal power and beauty, which in “Memória” more resembles Celine Dion than Donizetti.
Rosalía is at her most operatic in “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” a kind of aria that, like the earliest operas, is sung in Italian. By its climax, the song sounds as if it were written for Andrea Bocelli.
It doesn’t get more kitschy than that. But maybe Rosalía would laugh with us on that point. She continually breaks the fourth wall in the recording studio, and in this song she follows the vocal climax by before cuing a big orchestral finish.
She’s having fun. Classical music and opera clearly aren’t her home. But on “Lux,” they’re her playground”.
PHOTO CREDIT: Chris Maggio for The New York Times
In the first of a few interviews I want to introduce, I am starting off with Joe Coscarelli and Jon Caramanica’s Interview for The New York Times. On a masterpiece where the Spanish artist sings in thirteen different languages, we discover how LUX was this “ labor of love exploring the feminine divine and the brutalities of romance”. It is fascinating reading interview around LUX. People are still talking about the album and I think it will continue for the rest of the year, so big and important are the waves and ripples created by it. Such a hugely powerful work that has raised discussions. A major artist blurring the lines of Pop and pushing it to its limits. Changing courses rapidly but retaining her own vision and voice:
“JOE COSCARELLI And it’s not only a rejection of your own prior work, but it seems to be you looking at the pop landscape and saying, implicitly or explicitly, we’re not doing enough.
ROSALÍA I don’t look to the outside that much, but more like, what am I not doing? What have I not done yet? What do I need to do? And I think that my favorite artists, maybe, are the ones who don’t give you what you want, but what you need.
At the end of the day, making albums for me is like excuses to do what I actually want to be doing. In this case, I wanted to just read more.
COSCARELLI What were you reading?
ROSALÍA Hagiografias, so many hagiografias. Simone Weil, Chris Kraus. These nuns, they were amazing poets, great artists — Hildegard of Bingen — she was like a polímata [polymath], right? She was able to create in so many ways. There’s so many amazing women in history that we don’t listen to enough, we don’t talk about enough.
I just try to be a musician the best way I can and push in experimentation. If that’s literally staying at home, just writing lyrics for a year — or waking up early, sleeping barely nothing to go to the studio and stay for 14 hours working on mixes and not even having them ever perfect enough — that’s what it is to me. I think it is a job at the end of the day.
CARAMANICA Your prior two albums have been trying to reconcile coming from a robust cultural tradition but wanting to break those rules, getting a lot of acclaim and then saying, What do I do with this added attention and responsibility and success? Those felt outward-reaching but this feels different, more internal.
ROSALÍA The other day, I was thinking I made an album from a very different place than I’ve ever done before.
I was hearing this man, he was saying that there’s two different types of confidence, the one that is based on the belief that you’re going to have success — como por mis cojones, we say, right? So you’re kind of like pushing whatever you have to do.
There’s another confidence, which maybe is the lack of fear of failure. I think there’s surrender in this approach. I think it’s the first time that I allowed myself to make an album from this place. Complete surrender — this is what I actually needed to say and sing about and do.
COSCARELLI There was some masculine energy in “Motomami,” which focused on more Caribbean music like reggaeton. Do you think of “Lux” as a distinctly feminine project?
ROSALÍA The main inspiration is feminine mystique, so then for sure there’s more feminine energy. And also the idea of, ser un receptaculo — being a vessel. I was reading the other day, this woman, Ursula [K. Le Guin] says that maybe the first cultural device in history was not a weapon — it was not something sharp to kill something. Maybe it was a vessel, something where you can gather things? And so she was saying that there’s a difference between masculine writing and feminine writing: Masculine writing is about the hero, the triumphs of this hero. And if the hero is not in the story, then it’s not a good story. It’s all about the conflict in the narrative.
Feminine writing, it’s more about an ongoing process. It’s not about the climax and then the resolution. It’s about maybe a person with delusions and transformations and all the things that this person has to lose. It’s not about me, me, I, I.
COSCARELLI This album is grand, there are strings everywhere, highly arranged. It’s operatic.
CARAMANICA Thundering.
ROSALÍA It has this intention of verticality. Some of our projects felt a little bit more horizontal. A more mundane type of energy”.
Maybe it will make this interview seem too disconnected and truncated, though there were a few questions from this NPR interview that interested me. You can read the entire thing, though I wanted to bring in a small sample. I am especially interested by the spirituality and religious iconography through LUX, so reading ROSALÍA’s responses to questions around that are particularly relevant:
“Before this interview I was talking to my editor who also heard this album and she was like, I feel like this is less global than Motomami was.
Interesting.
To me, it is the most global — one, the languages is pretty obvious. But two, yes, it's classical. But classical at one point [was] the lingua franca of the world. Same with Catholicism, really. There's that flamenco is based in Arab culture and Spanish folk and all of these…
In Africa…
And I hear South Asian sounds, I hear Mexican sounds…
Persian… so much.
It's just more subtle. And the subtlety to me feels more natural, honestly. It feels like, oh, the world is effortlessly fitting into a sound that does feel more uniform.
I've experienced different things through all these years of traveling and being exposed to other music and being exposed to other cultures. And all of that I think I carry with me with so much love, and I'm like, I want this to be part of this album. I exist in the world and the world exists within me. I feel like hopefully my love is plural and it's infinite. The same way I'm here and everything can be here and how can I explain this in a song? And I tried. That's what you can find in "La Yugular" That's what it's about. My favorite art, it's where it's a little bit blurry — the personal and the universal.
On this record there's a ton of religious iconography, but it feels spiritual to me in a different way.
Mysticism is the inspiration. It's not trying to fit too much into specific codes, but more of what is my truth, what is my faith and how can I explain this and put it into words which is so hard?
And what you were describing earlier about ["La Yugular"] and ending in the world, and the world ending in you, it kind of reminds me of in Islam, the idea of we're all one soul.
That's the inspiration in that song. That's studying from Islam and being like, okay, so that's the foundations of it. How can I explain these on a song? I'm going to put these ideas, so beautiful, on a song”.
This incredible modern-day classic about female saints, ROSALÍA spoke with The Guardian about forgiveness over cancel culture. It is interesting reading how she has courted controversy because of her music. Not only on LUX from those who feel her use of Classical and Opera is inauthentic or distils the genres. Whether that is her use of sexualised lyrics or bringing Flamenco into Pop (or vice versa), it seems that there is this puritanical streak – especially in Spain – that means artists, especially women, are criticised if they are bold and experiment. Fortunately, it seems that ROSALÍA will continue to be unapologetic and do what she wants. An album like LUX should be celebrated rather than face any criticism:
“What also allowed Rosalía to make an album like this is her unique status. No matter what her critics make of her globe-straddling approach, the exacting study she puts into it, and the supreme execution, are irreproachable. “I always try to find ways to keep learning,” she says. Although she’s learning French and German on Duolingo, she spent a year working with native speakers to get the Lux translations right, including Charlotte Gainsbourg and Justice for the French parts; she also took piano lessons for the first time since she stopped tuition at 16. Equally irreproachable is her pop cultural nous: filming a role for season three of HBO’s Euphoria, modelling for Calvin Klein, being papped taking a bouquet of cigarettes to Charli xcx’s birthday party. On stage on the bravura Motomami tour – probably the decade’s best – Rosalía always had an invasive cameraman on her trail, a comment on voyeurism amplified by the portrait-mode big screens, themselves a sharp reflection on how phones shape our perspective. Rosalía has mastered the sort of celebrity that buys you three years to make an album about God, transcendence and absolution, blowing the budget several times over.
PHOTO CREDIT: Noah P Dillon
She estimates that she produced 97% of Lux alone. “It probably is the most demanding album I’ve ever tried to do,” she says. She made it in Los Angeles, far from her family and home in Barcelona: “The solitude, the isolation, it’s pretty hard to deal with.” But her work requires that kind of asceticism. “I consider myself pretty social, but to do something like this, there’s no other way – it takes a lot of simplifying the day, doing barely nothing but this.” To write, she has to lie in bed. “It comes much easier when you let it come to you and make the space to try to erase yourself and disappear.”
Much as Rosalía would rather disappear into the heady Lux, all the beatification stuff evidently shrouds a classic breakup album. I am also told not to ask about relationships: in 2023, Rosalía and Puerto Rican reggaeton star Rauw Alejandro ended their engagement, months after releasing a loved-up joint EP. On Rosalía’s rhapsodic new song La Perla, she indicts “un terrorista emocional”. “Mejor hablar / Ahora que / Callarme para siempre,” [“I’d rather speak now than forever hold my peace”] she sings on Focu ‘Ranni – a likely callback to El Mal Querer’s Que No Salga la Luna, sung as the abusive groom of the 13th-century Occitan text Flamenca that inspired the album: “Si hay alguien que aquí se oponga / Que no levante la vo’” (“if someone objects, may they not raise their voice”). Another saint she cites, la santuzza Rosalia, called off her wedding the day before the planned ceremony to live as a hermit.
Perfect reverence isn’t Rosalía’s style. “I know that I was made to divinise,” she sings in English on Divinize, likening her vertebrae to rosary beads; Reliquia (relic) makes you think of how she cut off a lock of hair to give to a fan each night on the Motomami tour. God Is a Stalker embodies his first-person perspective; the album’s wild array of languages suggests godlike omniscience. On the cartoonish yet seething Novia Robot (“Robot Girlfriend”), Rosalía decries men who want women to be pliant and emotionless, and sings that she’s “guapa para Dios” – hot for God. She says she always second guesses herself when toying with symbolism, “but that’s something I have to deal with. The beauty of art is putting things on the table and proposing questions, and probably finding more questions than answers – but playfulness is important in order to create.”
It feels inevitable that Rosalía will encounter more criticism for Lux. Some fans are disappointed at her telling Le Monde that locking away her phone to focus on recording meant she wasn’t engaged with the conflicts in Palestine and Ukraine (though in response to a fashion designer who questioned her silence on Palestine, she condemned the conflict and said: “I do not see how shaming ourselves is the best way to keep the right moving forward for Palestine’s freedom”). Other criticisms now just seem like occupational hazard: scroll her social media profiles and you’ll see quite a shocking, absurd level of scrutiny and disapproval in the comments.
Much Spanish media started to turn against Rosalía when she introduced pop to flamenco; she encountered more criticism for the sexualised lyrics on Motomami, and for her thirst-trappy social media presence. There’s a respectability trap for women that the sanctified Lux mocks.
“I deal with that by remembering who inspires me,” says Rosalía. “Irreverent women like Joan of Arc, Aretha Franklin, Nina Simone, Patti Smith, Cher – divas. They carry the weight and they … supportan.” She hunches under an imagined weight. “Endure. And so that is my inspiration. What I love about them is that they are unapologetic about what they want and what they do, what their path is. That’s a guide, un faro – a lighthouse. Through time, diva has had this negative connotation. But nowadays I don’t feel like it has the same way, and I celebrate women that are unapologetic and that do their path”.
The first of three reviews for LUX I am bringing in is from Pitchfork. Even though it is disappointing that there were so many discussions around LUX and whether it is Pop or it tries to do Classic and Opera and never really does either well, we just need to accept artists will experiment and innovate and that is a good thing. Not boxing and pigeon-holing them in or feeling Pop cannot bring in Classical and Opera. Always this thing about purity and authenticity. This ignorance and elitism that still exists. Pitchfork were impressed by LUX. They wrote how, on her fourth studio album, ROSALÍA offers up “avant-garde classical pop that roars through genre, romance, and religion”:
“LUX takes desire as a holy problem and divinity as a complex solution. Love, men, God, femininity, death, surrender—they all swirl around this idea, expressed in Japanese, Ukrainian, Chinese, Italian, and nine more languages. How did Rosalía begin to understand life’s thorniest questions? She read hagiographies of female saints and poets like Teresa de Jesus, Sun Bu’er, and Hildegard Von Bingen; she studied feminist theory while preparing lines for her acting debut in Euphoria. She looked to these devout women for inspiration and synthesized their messages into her own creed as a 33-year-old pop star trying to make sense of all this insanity.
In this way, LUX feels like a modern scripture of feminine celebrity. “My God I’ll obey… I’ll burn the Rolls‑Royce… tiraré mis Jimmy Choos,” she vows on “Sauvignon Blanc,” promising to renounce luxury in exchange for some ascetic peace. On “Reliquia,” she shrugs off fame as a form of sacrifice—“My heart’s never been my own”—and offers herself as a relic for the world to hold. On “Dios es un stalker,” Rosalia becomes a flawed God, her obsessions with other humans become feral–“I’m your shadow,” “I’m the labyrinth”–she delivers over clean bass and choral filigree like a fucked up prayer, proof that not even otherworldly heroes are free from mortal flaw.
It’s no secret that Rosalía’s engagement to Puerto Rican superstar Rauw Alejandro ended in 2023, right before she began work on this record. LUX also details the journey of heartbreak and recovery first through a pious lens, then blows it up tenfold. On the standout “La Perla,” she cuts men without flinching—“emotional terrorist,” “red flag andante”—a controlled evisceration that could sit next to Fiona Apple in the museum of magnificent dismissals. On the other side is “Mio Cristo,” where she deifies a lover’s pain—“My Christ cries diamonds”—only to face the hard question: “How many blows should have been hugs?” “Novia Robot” takes a broader approach with a mock infomercial for a compliant, purchasable girlfriend. It’s a satire that plays like one of the album’s clearest theses: a woman’s beauty owes no debt to male consumption.
On LUX, forgiveness is a religious doctrine, captured best by Flamenco pop highlight “La Rumba del Perdón.” Modern flamenco stars Estrella Morente and Silvia Pérez Cruz sing through family betrayals and street parables while Rosalía argues that forgiveness is an active decision that restores control to the wounded, even “when power beats out love,” or your best friend steals that “uncut kilo in the drawer.” The closing movement is smaller in frame but larger in feeling. “Memória” takes inventory of what remains, and “Magnolia” releases what will not: “life flashed me its knife, took everything I had, and I thanked her for that.” The promise from the opener holds: She returns to earth, not a saint, but simply finished, landing on that rare pop sensation of being held, seen, and leveled all at once.
Can all this easily be labeled pop music? Yes, but not the kind that chases the algorithm. LUX sits comfortably beside albums that use concert music as a conduit to turn heartbreak into archetypal feminine quests: Vulnicura, Ys, Hounds of Love, Titanic Rising, MAGDALENE. The “bangers” are there; you’re just more likely to find them in a pasture than on a billboard. “Focu’Ranni” swells over chopped voice samples in a melody that feels like the older, wiser cousin to El Mal Querer’s “Pienso en tu mirá”; “Porcelana” raps, gleams, and snarls through descriptions of a tortured diva; and “De Madrugá” speeds by like a meteor aimed at an ex-lover. LUX enlarges the capacity of Rosalía’s artistry without abandoning the direct address that made people fall for her in the first place”.
It is rare that source a music review from The New Yorker, but that is because they do not produce that many. Maybe the nature and sound of LUX is something that fascinated them or couldn’t be ignored. It shows how important, powerful and groundbreaking LUX is that it has caused so many corners of culture and the media to react and offer examination:
“There is a story to “Lux,” or maybe there are a few different stories. The lyrics hint at love, betrayal (one song includes the phrase “un terrorista emocional”), revenge, and acceptance. The combined effect can be exhausting, in ways Rosalía’s previous albums never were: the twists and turns of “La Yugular,” a theological exploration inspired by Islam, are easier to admire than to enjoy—at least until the finale, a pleasingly earthy clip from an old Patti Smith interview. Sometimes the lightest moments are the most affecting, such as when, in “Reliquia,” Rosalía floats into her upper register, delivering a sumptuous and faintly sacrilegious expression of love and loss. “I’ll be your relic / I am your relic,” she sings, in Spanish, and for a moment it all seems simple.
Like virtually all musicians, Rosalía seems to have mixed feelings about how separate she wants to be, really, from the pop marketplace. “I need to think that what I’m doing is pop, because otherwise I don’t think, then, that I am succeeding,” she told the New York Times, in a recent interview. “What I want is to do music that, hopefully, a lot of people can enjoy.” But of course that’s not all she wants. The single most surprising contributor to “Lux” is Mike Tyson, who during a chaotic 2002 press conference told a journalist, “I’ll fuck you till you love me, faggot.” This phrase, without the incendiary final word, interrupts the otherwise elegant coda of “Berghain,” shouted a few times by the electronic producer Yves Tumor. The interruption is a shock—startling enough, perhaps, to dissuade some listeners from adding the song to their favorite streaming playlists, lest it ruin the mood. Maybe that’s the idea. Music-streaming services encourage us to mix and match, so perhaps they also encourage us to spend more time listening to songs that fit pleasantly alongside other songs. A small but significant number of musicians have begun to withhold their music from these outlets, some for economic reasons (the sites don’t pay much), some for political reasons (Daniel Ek, the C.E.O. of Spotify, is also the chairman of a military-technology company), and some for no stated reason at all. The new Rosalía album is available everywhere, but it echoes this desire to withdraw from a big, messy system, in the hope of encouraging listeners to engage in a more intentional, single-minded way; it’s an album that’s not designed to be ubiquitous, or to slip smoothly into our lives and playlists. “Lux” wants to make us stop whatever we’re doing and listen, which inevitably means that it’s less broadly appealing—less listenable, in a sense—than albums that ask less. It’s also much harder to forget”.
I am going to end with a review from NME. Heralding an artist who has released an “album of astonishing scope and ambition”, this is someone who never repeats herself. Doing something for each album, there is no doubt LUX is the best album of this year. Anyone who criticises a modern Pop/mainstream artist for blending Classical music and Opera into their music is a snob and misinformed. If better known for genres like Reggaeton, New Flamenco or Pop, it is wonderful that ROSALÍA has done this. It also brings these genres more to the forefront. You will see other artists follow her lead:
“The 33-year-old’s fourth and latest album, though, might just be her most adventurous yet. ‘Lux’ contains not just whole worlds, but astral planes, bridging the gap between Earth and whatever you believe heaven to be. It features the Spanish star singing in 13 different languages, including Japanese, Arabic, Portuguese, Ukrainian, Latin and Sicilian. She spent a year poring over lyrics, first feeding her instinctive writing into Google Translate and then working closely with professional translators to make sure each line felt natural but also sounded right in song. And its concept was inspired by Rosalía immersing herself in hagiographies, inspired by stories of female saints – or figures comparable to saints in other religions and cultures – from across the globe.
‘Lux’ is, then, an album that asks a lot of you, particularly spanning 18 tracks and one hour in length. But give it what it demands, and it will reward you many times over. It is an astonishing record – one that continuously stops you dead in your tracks, encourages curiosity, and builds a new world for you to dive into, while connecting to the sounds of all of Rosalía’s previous releases. “The more we are in the era of dopamine, the more I want the opposite,” she recently told the New York Times’ Popcast podcast. This album reinforces that – there are no easy hits or quick highs, no addictive loops to get trapped in, and it’s all the more divine for it.
Divinity is central to ‘Lux’. It runs heavy on the spiritual and religious imagery, from Rosalía dressed in what looks like a nun’s habit on the cover to the frequent nods in the lyrics. “Each vertebra reveals a mystery / Pray on my spine, it’s a rosary”, she sings in gorgeous falsetto over shimmering strings and rumbling, rickety percussion on ‘Divinize’. Opener ‘Sexo, Violencia y Llantas’ finds her dividing up two worlds – our earthly chaos of “Blood sports / Coins on throats” and the more magical, mystical promised land of “Sparkles, pigeons and saints”. ‘Dios Es Un Stalker’ – or ‘God Is A Stalker’ in English – has her positioning herself, tongue-in-cheek, as the titular deity, sharing: “I’ve always been so spoiled / And worn out by all this omnipresence / But I’m gonna hijack this heart / I’m gonna stalk it and I’ll show no mercy”.
Rosalía makes bold moves on her latest masterpiece. ‘Mio Christo’ – sung entirely in Italian – is her take on an aria, her vocals soaring to emotional heights. In one moment grand and thundering, the next they’re soft and hushed, her control of her instrument never less than superlative. ‘Novia Robot’ – which features Spanish, Mandarin and Hebrew lyrics – centres on the story of the Chinese Taoist master Sun Bu’er, who intentionally spoiled her beauty by splashing boiling oil on her face to prevent any men she came across from being drawn to her and obstructing a journey she was to undertake from Shandong to Luoyang.
In Rosalía’s hands, that becomes a jump-off point to write about the objectification of women and capitalism’s role in maintaining that status quo. “Every purchase comes with a warranty because our policy is conceived to make us look good and make you happy, no matter the cost!” she says in a mocking spoken-word intro. “We’re proud to be the most successful company in 2025, the one with the highest revenue and the business that harms our sisters the most”.
I am going to wrap it up now. Such a staggering album that will blow you away the first time you hear it, this is the greatest thing that 2025 has produced. In a year when there has been some truly incredible album, ROSALÍA’s LUX is the frontrunner! This constantly evolving and inventive artist, there are few out there…
AS brilliant as her.