Rosalía's LUX is NPR Music's No. 1 album of 2025
At the moment this fall when NPR Music's staff began discussing our picks for the best albums of 2025, the mere existence of the record we'd eventually name our No. 1 – in a landslide, it must be said – was not known to anyone on our team. But as soon as we heard Rosalía's magnificent, head-spinning LUX in early November, one spot on our list was instantly confirmed.
For most of the year, consensus felt hard to come by. We all found plenty of music to love, but we weren't always drawn toward the same signals. LUX was different. Of the dozen critics and hosts who submitted lists (you can, and should, check out each of their lists, starting with their highest recommendations here), more than half included it in their top 10. Four of us said it was the best thing we heard all year. Below, each of them makes the argument for why it deserves that crown.
LUX is high art.
It's hard to describe Rosalía's artiest and most audacious left turn without rattling off statistics and credentials. "She sings in more than a dozen languages!" "She's working with the London Symphony Orchestra, and also Björk, and did you know that Caroline Shaw helped with arrangements?!" A work rich in footnotes, LUX spills over with lore about female saints, enhanced by efforts to translate, unpack and otherwise reckon with it.
LUX is a work of high art, sure. But it's also frequently, boldly, at times breathtakingly beautiful — a work of craft and care, empathy and deep emotion. "Reliquia" mutates from an orchestral piece into an electro-pop reverie, with a tear-jerking piano interlude along the way, and its vocal remains pristine enough to induce gasps. That's just one song among 18. —Stephen Thompson
LUX transcends genre.
Taking the full measure of what Rosalía pulls off on LUX is like trying to solve a single-line logic puzzle: Connect opera to maximalist pop to flamenco to electronica to Baroque orchestral music to rap (and much more) without lifting your pen or crossing any lines. It feels impossible. But Rosalía shows how with a profoundly stirring, unified feast for the ears. It's less reggaeton or bachata and more like reggaeton and bachata and Sigur Rós performing Les Misérables, with Feist and Maria Callas trading lead vocals.
But LUX isn't just sonic gymnastics. Deeply considered and exhaustively researched, it's a monument to both the incomprehensible mess and breathtaking wonder of being human, shifting seamlessly between fragile beauty and childlike magic to raw, lustful desire. It's as graphic and startling as it is rapturous and divine. And yeah, it's performed in 13 different languages, as Rosalía delivers a vast exegesis on everything from religion and sex to mortality and violence.
Arriving near the end of a brutally divisive year of attacks on identity and "otherness," LUX feels — and sounds — like the best possible reply, a necessary and potent reminder of the humanity that binds us and the miracle of being here at all. —Robin Hilton
LUX belongs in a lineage with one of the most beloved jazz albums of all time.
After listening to LUX for the first time, I spent days trying to understand why it felt both new and familiar. Then it hit me: The more I listened and read Rosalía's deeply personal lyrics, the more it reminded me of jazz saxophonist John Coltrane's seminal spiritual statement, A Love Supreme.
Hear me out.
Rosalía prepared herself for this moment by dividing her album into four parts, exploring feminine mysticism, transformation, transcendence and intimacy, subjects that curiously echo A Love Supreme's album track listings of "Acknowledgement," "Resolution," "Pursuance" and "Psalm."
By the time Coltrane recorded A Love Supreme in 1964, he had already experienced what he called a spiritual awakening that helped him kick addictions to alcohol and heroin, while exploring the sonic and musical limits of his saxophone. A Love Supreme is his moment of coming face to face with God. On LUX, after almost an hour's worth of intense and very musical meditations on things like feminine mysticism, light versus dark as well as spirituality and sacredness, Rosalía also comes face to face with God. But she asks God to meet her halfway: "God descends and I ascend / We meet in the middle."
Both of these albums are artfully crafted statements by artists with uncommon powers of musical communication who share with us spiritual journeys so personal that at times they feel like invasions of privacy. LUX meets the musical legacy of A Love Supreme in the middle and picks up where that classic left off. —Felix Contreras
LUX is still, at its heart, a spectacular flamenco record.
Flamenco feels like the sonic representation of the moment when Eve took a bite of the apple. Cast in an ancient fire so alive it's impossible to put out or pin down, its deceptiveness is its defiance. As experimental, big and seemingly novel as Rosalía's LUX is, it sounds like one thing: her spirit. Which — as she's chameleoned across the world — stays firmly rooted in flamenco's eternal flame.
She approached this record as she does all others: global eyes, an open heart and a Spanish soul. Flamenco is pastoral music, once used for basic communication and connection. Those original sounds — sweet lyrical lullabies and softly stroked strings — gave into temptation and fell in love with pain, fear, sadness, giving way to guttural cries and desperate strums.
On LUX, there's something beyond technical ingenuity or global experience to the way the music — and its maker — morphs from track to track. What ties an entire world of sounds and languages together is an artist who enters a sonic moment and complicates it, tears it down, ruining beautiful things with a deep human-ness. Flamenco is etched in concrete yet almost always vibrating, changing; striking palms cutting up some of the most shape-shifting, dynamic vocals on Earth. Ten notes within one, a hundred emotions in two breaths. Despite apparent sonic distance, LUX may be Rosalía's most flamenco album yet. —Anamaria Sayre
Read about more of NPR Music's favorite albums of 2025 and our list of the 125 best songs of 2025.
Graphic illustration by David Mascha for NPR.
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