Top albums of the year: from Bad Bunny to Rosalía

Rosalía: Lux

The 33-year-old Catalan musician Rosalía was a phenomenon even before the release of “Lux”, said Julyssa Lopez in Rolling Stone. Her 2018 album “El Mal Querer”, which played with flamenco traditions, and 2022’s “Motomami”, which drew on everything from reggaeton to classical music, both won global acclaim. Her latest, however, has sent her stratospheric, earning ecstatic reviews and unlikely commercial success. “Lux” is a “transcendent” collection – inspired by the lives of female saints and sung in 14 languages – which is filled with both classical and pop orchestration and rawly emotional operatic singing. It’s a “gorgeous, gutting package that feels like a timeless work of art”.

“Lux” is a “masterpiece”, said Roisin O’Connor in The Independent. With aspects of flamenco, Romantic-era opera, baroque, electronic and indie, it features soprano vocals, massed choirs, fado singer Carminho, Patti Smith, Björk and the LSO. “Rosalía is doing something different, and she’s doing it really, really well.”

Wolf Alice: The Clearing

“The Clearing“ is the “kind of album that could only be written after the dust has settled on your 20s, and the post-30 clarity has set in”, said Rhian Daly on NME. It’s a “sublime” collection, on which the London alt-rockers swap the harder side of their oeuvre for more layered, nuanced, slower-tempo songs. Just as we all get wiser with every year, Wolf Alice “keep on getting better with every record, and here, they raise the bar on themselves once again”.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Ginastera: String Quartets (Kiera Duffy/Miró Quartet)

The 20th-century Argentinian composer Alberto Ginastera wrote three “extraordinary” string quartets, said Andrew Farach-Colton in Gramophone. The first abounds with folk-like melodies; the second is more dissonant and febrile; the third adds soprano settings of Spanish poetry. With polished yet heartfelt playing from the Miró Quartet, and Kiera Duffy’s wonderfully expressive singing, this is a “stunning achievement”.

Dijon: Baby

The American artist Dijon Duenas’ second album is “nothing short of a triumph”, said Jeff Ihaza in Rolling Stone. Inspired by his love for his partner and child, “Baby” combines traditional R&B with thrilling sonic experimentation. “Throughout the album, fragments of sounds – fiery ad-libs, golden-age hip-hop samples, whizzing, inverted vocal riffs – all jut out like beams of light piercing through the pitch black of night.”

Lily Allen: West End Girl

This “brutal, tell-all masterpiece” is Lily Allen’s best work since her era-defining albums of the 2000s, said Hannah Ewens in The Independent. Melding lounge, doowop, soul, folk, dancehall and western twang, “West End Girl” is “not just confessional pop, it’s obliterative; an emotional postmortem carried out in public, a death-by-a-million-cuts account of a thoroughly modern marriage breakdown”.

Suede: Antidepressants

The list of “truly worthwhile band reunions” is short – and topped by Suede, said Ed Power in The i Paper. Since they reformed in 2010, the arty, angsty Britpoppers have “forged ahead with a series of thrilling and challenging records”, of which “Antidepressants” is the best yet. It’s a “snarling tour de force” about the ravages of time: the defining mood is one of glorious, “incandescent fury”.

Hayley Williams: Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party

Paramore’s Hayley Williams is one of our time’s most “creative and fearless artists”, said Rachel Roberts in Kerrang!, and this album – an introspective yet propulsive collection that mixes alt-rock and synth pop – has been widely hailed as her best yet. The wit and honesty of Williams’ lyric writing is “the shining star of this work”; it’s a “musical purge of trauma patterns, depression, love, loss and, of course, ego”.

Bad Bunny: DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS

Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny is the king of Latin rap and the world’s biggest artist of 2025 on Spotify, with almost 20 billion streams. His smash-hit sixth album (I Should Have Taken More Photos) is his most “determined and resonant yet”, said Thania Garcia in Variety. Lyrically, the focus is anti-colonialism and Puerto Rican pride. Musically, the album is ambitious but cohesive, drawing on genres including salsa, reggaeton, dembow and plena.

Ryan Davis & the Roadhouse Band: New Threats from the Soul

For this second solo album, Ryan Davis has produced a “beautiful and wildly smart” set of tracks “about making do in an upside-down world”, said Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker. Full of “yearning, dark jokes and wordy disquisitions on desire”, this is storytelling music in the vein of MJ Lenderman or the late David Berman. Listening to these witty, tender songs, it’s “hard to know whether to chuckle or to clutch your heart”.

The Last Dinner Party: From the Pyre

The Last Dinner Party’s debut, “Prelude to Ecstasy”, “was a game-changer of a record, one that combined baroque pop with bigger rock sensibilities”, said Nick Reilly in Rolling Stone UK. The London band’s return is just as good, packed with glamrock belters and Queen-style drama – and “should cement their place in the biggest of leagues”. Their sound here is more defined, the mood darker, but they’ve lost none of their flamboyance and humour.

Olivia Dean: The Art of Loving

If you worry that pop music is “being travestied by streaming and TikTok into hooky two-minute jingles without intros or bridges”, then take heart from the vast commercial success of Olivia Dean, said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the Financial Times. The 26-year-old neo-soul singer from London is a “traditionalist whose songs do the things that proper songs should, like tell stories and employ key changes”. This gorgeous album is a real step up; the sound of a major artist finding her voice.

Beethoven for Three

In these sublime performances of Beethoven’s 1st Symphony in a slimmed-down arrangement – plus three wonderful piano trios – the “three great musicians playing” are clearly having a blast, said Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph. “You feel pianist Emanuel Ax’s sly wit, violinist Leonidas Kavakos’ ringing passion, and cellist Yo-Yo Ma’s yearning expressivity. They are also wonderfully responsive to each other, and the music. The result is pure Beethoven, and pure bliss.”

CMAT: Euro-Country

This was the year of the “CMAT summer”, said Victoria Segal in The Times; and the sound of this stunning album from the Irish singer was the “unmistakable splintering crash of a proper momentous breakthrough”. Ciara Mary-Alice Thompson combines lyrics about social anxiety and her own aesthetic sensibilities with earworm pop melodies, to glittering effect. The title track, about the impact of the 2008 crash, is a song so powerful it will send you “flying across the room”.

Dave: The Boy Who Played the Harp

David Omoregie – the 27-year-old London rapper Dave – is a fantastically smart, sharp lyricist, and his latest album is a flat-out triumph, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. It also made the arena-filling star the first British rap artist to have three albums go straight to No. 1. “Harp” is light on self-aggrandising swagger and heavy on existential crisis and religious motifs. It is “fascinating, rather than self-indulgent”, and offers a vast range of “subtle pleasures”, from skittering beats and helium-vocal samples to “quietly eerie” harmonies.

It’s an “exceptional” album, agreed Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. There’s none of the levity of “Sprinter”, Dave’s “laddish” smash-hit single with Central Cee from 2023, or of 2018’s “Funky Friday”. Instead, there are sparse arrangements and gentle piano motifs. James Blake adds “tenderly sung hooks” to a couple of tracks; other star guests include Kano (as a kind of rap father figure) and singer Nicole Blakk. Full of “vivid lyricism, powerful storytelling and involving music”, this is a “five-star offering from the pinnacle of UK rap”.