Reasons To Be Encouraged That Rosalia’s Lux Was the Consensus Album of the Year, b/w Reasons To Be Concerned That Rosalia’s Lux Was the Consensus Album of the Year.
Before the dust settles on the maximalist year 2025.....
Randomish phrases prompted by quick perusal of the Best Albums of 2025 lists: Thoughtful content or extravagantly bold empty gestures? Visionary genius or groupthink or what French philosopher Guy Debord called the “Herd of Independent Minds”? Goose or Geese?
The year-end list reflects the personal logic (and biases) of each human listmaker. It’s an imperfect metric of creativity, much less innovation. Some lists simply feature what critics enjoyed – the pleasure listen. Some are a ritual of attendence-taking, acknowledging work across countless subsets of subgenres. Some critics cite only efforts they regard as bellweathers of innovation to be heeded by future creators, while others champion the records that jolted them awake (not always the same thing.)
Almost immediately after Rosalia’s Lux arrived in early November, there arose an enthusiastic chorus from those hardy scribes still active in the music-journalism racket, proclaiming the album as clearly and quite obviously the Album of the Year. The consensus favorite. Get in line.
Biggest swing for the farthest fences to arrive this year? Absolutely. Most likely to sweep the awards? Sure. It’s very good and refreshingly ambitious work, and unlike so much popular music, Lux has a point of view, it celebrates faith and questions it in deep, important ways. It rewards repeat listening. But, as sometimes happens, the arguments used to extol its “genius” don’t always hold up under repeated exposure to the actual music within the 18 tracks. After reading a bunch of these pieces – which, in lockstep, enthuse about la diva Rosalia singing in multiple languages!, with operatic flourishes!, with the London Symphony Orchestra as her backing band! – I began to wonder about groupthink. And the desperate barren landscape of pop music in this moment, and how it might engender a bit of grading on a curve.
In a recent NPR Music piece on consensus among critics in year-end 2025, Ann Powers began by noting the instantanenous Rosalia hosannas, then wrote that “the small wave of mild dissenters often seem more dismayed at their failure to join in than eager to argue against it.”
This polarity doesn’t leave room for another, more temperate subset of the music-consuming public: Those listeners who have zero angst over “failing to join in” yet after repeated encounters (even following the artist’s directive to listen to Lux in a darkened environment with no distractions), find themselves asking questions, valid musical ones, about the enterprise.
It’s healthy to be skeptical here: For every think piece raving about the orchestrational brilliance on display – and its connections to the classical music canon – there’s a counterargument that the strings are mostly sawing away at repetitive (and harmonically uninteresting) four-measure vamps designed to heighten the melodrama, precisely as happens on Disney soundtracks.
And so on.
Here, in list form, are a few reasons to celebrate Lux, followed by reasons to perhaps question it.
Reasons To Be Encouraged That Rosalia’s Lux Was the Critical Consensus Choice for Album of the Year
It’s a big bold swing. Lux explores a subject that’s ubiquitous in pop music, the painful aftermath of romance, in strikingly original ways. It foregrounds devotion as a personal act and a spiritual one, and uses the techniques of each to speak to the other. Though organized as a four-part suite, it’s less a song cycle than a vibe opera – a tour of carefully wrought emotional flashpoints, each drawing on specific musical devices to evoke visceral, physical reactions.
It became popular while dodging the (increasingly stifling) conventions of pop music. Lux, which benefited from a brilliant marketing launch, is not a pop album. Its success is necessary and refreshing. It’s a cleanse for a star-making machinery that currently seems unable to do much beyond recycling.
It’s loaded with muso details. These are, crucially, not common on records aimed at the pop audience. Some Lux tracks revolve around multiple tempos and rhythms, and utilize the full complement of drama-enhancing devices to underscore or maximize those shifts – grand pauses, accellerandos and rallantandos, eerie slow fades, etc.
It’s multi-lingual. Arriving at a geopolitical moment of rising nationalism and concomittant fear, Rosalia’s Lux makes the unspoken point, over and over again, that the things we feel, our empathies and emotions, transcend language.
It’s also multicultural. With Lux, Rosalia brings the emotional vulnerability of her early flamenco-rooted work into elaborate sonic landscapes that are defiantly global. Beyond the aforementioned orchestral expanses are pieces centered on electronic collage, hip-hop rhythm, Afro-Cuban rumba.
It’s got breathtaking vocal performances. There are many. Today, I’m immersed in the measured, hauntingly deliberate phrasing of “La Yugular.”
It uses guest voices as spirit guides. In conceptualizing the sweep of Lux, Rosalia drew some inspiration from Vespertine-era Bjork; the Icelandic singer’s presence on the single “Berghain” merely underscores that. More interesting is the spoken snippet from Patti Smith, which speaks directly to the bold spirit of Lux.
It is expansive sonically. In terms of composition and execution, Lux aims for the mountaintop. And, for a change, so does the mix: Not only do we hear – and feel! – the exacting coordinated attacks of the string section, we sense the tremble of the tympani as it generates the beginnings of a swell, and the snap of electronic cymbals and on and on. How detailed is it? Check out any stoptime moment; when the music ends there’s no room sound, no echo, just a sudden stunning absence, a void of blank space.
Reasons To Be Concerned That Rosalia’s Lux Was the Critical Consensus Choice for Album of the Year.
It’s an ambitious setting of unambitious music. At first Lux seems bold in both its big-picture gestures and granular details – in the sweeping narratives, the wide-screen high-gloss orchestrations, the irreverent juxtapositions of ideas from different worlds. Repeat listens suggest that maybe the album is also a triumph of window dressing. Rosalia wrote multiple examples of three or four types of conventional song forms here, and though they vary in terms of relationship to tradition (flamenco or otherwise), they follow similar paths to similar culminations. Doesn’t take long before they become discernible as templates.
It’s at once vulnerable and emotionally manipulative. In her quest to bring listeners into the turbulent emotional landscapes of these songs, Rosalia reaches for the same fierce, nearly distraught phrasing strategy again and again. It’s not terribly subtle. The first few times these moves might be arresting. But over a work of such length, the ready-made always-on anguish, which she seems to think certifies the “realness” of the emotion, becomes a bludgeon.
It’s a sonic bombardment too. Almost all of Lux unfolds as a wide-screen epic creation. That’s an accomplishment. But over the course of again, a long work, that pitch becomes tiresome. Contrast the overwrought tone of Lux with just about anything from another terrific 2025 work on many lists, Cecile McLorin Salvant’s radiant, gloriously small-scale Oh Snap: Rosalia drags her listener through the wounds like a soldier revisiting steps in a battle. Salvant goes low key and subversive to explore her wounds and weak spots, with a playfulness that animates the entire work, makes it approachable.
It’s melodically challenged. Lux starts with an austere gem of pure melody: The theme that opens “Sexo, Violencia y Llantas” glances meaningfully at the arias Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote for his revered Bachianas Brasileiras. Pretty soon, though, Rosalia’s melodic contours and cadences settle into repetitive pathways. (Maybe it comes with the territory: To varying degrees, the “statement” records of Beyonce and Taylor Swift fell victim to this as well.)
The orchestra is not an instant virtue signifier of high art. There are stirring, beautifully rendered instrumental passages on Lux, but just as often the arrangements drift into a vague melodrama. This can seem inadequate next to the mythic struggles of the narratives.
It’s monochromatic. There might be 50 ways to leave a lover, and 50 more to forget about a lover. Not all of them involve strident declarative singing. Among the many entreaties to various deities and saints here, the most effective happen at a whisper.
There’s lots of recitative. Rosalia leans on the operatic device of recitative – in which the narrative is advanced through declarative singing, in torrents of words hovering around the same pitch. Though she uses it effectively, at times you wish she’d seek out variety in the form of highwire inverallic leaps or light fluttering phrases, or maybe even a giggle.