Top 50 Albums of 2025: No. 1 – Rosalía: Lux | Rosalia

HeyOn paper, Lux reads more like a particularly challenging bonus round at University Challenge than a new album from a pop artist whose previous single was a collaboration with Blackpink’s Lisa. Divided into four distinct movements and sung in 13 languages, Lux is a stunning, classical-juxtaposed work that explores feminine mystique, religious transgression, and physical transformation, often through the perspective of several female saints. The dissolution of the relationship—established and revealed in director Lily Allen’s West End Girl, another 2025 dissection of heartbreak—is shot to the heavens here, influenced by the constant presence of the London Symphony Orchestra and the input of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw among a long list of collaborators. Her audacity alone makes the efforts of Rosalía’s pop music peers seem laughable.

The fact that Lux managed to go beyond scientific chin stroking and deep dive into the Wiki is almost a miracle, and it’s all thanks to Rosalia alone. Although this isn’t her first album to combine past and present — see 2018’s El Mal Querer and its flamenco-R&B hybrid — the stakes are much higher on Lux, and the balancing act more pronounced. What elevates her fourth album, beyond the layered melodies, rich textures and inherent drama, is the playfulness at its heart. Like Björk during her 90s heyday, there’s a sense of wonder to Rosalía’s voice that sweeps you along into a tornado. Even when she tears your heart in two, as in the blossoming ode to La Yugular, or ascends to the sky in Magnolias’ closing aria, you want to be there with her.

The best example of this exuberance comes at the end of the Italian piano ballad Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti. Inspired by Saint Clare of Assisi, it luxuriates in a string-filled spiral of sadness for over four minutes. However, suddenly, it all falls away and we hear Rosalía laugh “that’ll be the energy” before the OTT comic series goes up like an animation anvil. The song then segues quickly into Berghain’s solo, which bursts into view amidst a storm of Vivaldi strings, a majestic German chorus and a cameo from Björk playing Auntie Pain.

Never knowing—or wanting to know—where you stand with Lux is part of the magic that deepens the more you listen. Almost every song ends in a completely different place than where it started. Reliquia explores the trappings and transience of fame via a light symphony before completely dissolving into an electronic cacophony. On Porcelana, which tracks closer to 2022’s sweaty Motomami and its pop-adjacent collage, things start off moody, as Rosalía wanders around sinister drum fills and clipped male vocals, before an angelic chorus joins the fluttering flamenco handclaps to smooth out the song’s rough edges.

Another of Lux’s balancing acts is reconciling experimentation with accessibility. It’s no coincidence that Lux became Rosalía’s first album to break the top five in both the UK and the US: at its heart is a collection of undeniable pop songs. Divinize, the only song on which Rosalía sings in English, centers around a chorus that seems to gather more and more annoying hooks as it spins skyward. It’s a feat that La Yugular repeats, expanding and contracting as it weaves together layered melodies like a tapestry. The waltz-like La Perla seduces with its playful, Disney-adjacent musical drama and chorus, while lyrically aligning itself with West End Girl’s pop-culture-altering honesty as it eviscerates (in Spanish) an ex-lover’s “emotional terrorist” whose “only masterpiece is his bra collection.” All the while, Rosalía sings with a forced smile, like a knife-hiding Cinderella: “Gold medal for being a bitch / You got the platform of disappointment.”

Lux is pop on an extreme scale, a capital-hungry access-art set against the impending void of artificial intelligence. It eschews solipsism in favor of glorious transcendence, creating an OTT drama that holds true to the standards of its absurdity. It’s a deep well of hidden treasure that takes time to fully unearth but doesn’t feel like hard work. While some of the big pop albums of 2025 have seemed to feed on scraps, Lux is a banquet where characters move around the table, some drinking holy wine, from conversations about historical saints to a soul-crushing sense of sadness, to shared gossip about useless men. It’s a contemporary musical from pop music’s most innovative practitioners.