The albums ‘Lux’, by Spain’s Rosalía, and ‘Debí tirar más fotos’, by Puerto Rico’s Bad Bunny, are on Friday’s list of the 25 best albums of 2025 drawn up by the critics of The New York Times.
The list is topped by rising Korean pop star Effie and indie rock band Brooklyn Geese.
“Rosalía is a restless and tireless consumer of the world and its many ideas, and one of those rare artists in any medium who wants to leave the places she goes better than she found them (and, in fact, can),” notes the paper, which includes in each comment a link to listen to the album.
Lux’ was released three years after the success of ‘Motomami’ (2022) and features collaborations with artists such as Björk, Carminho, Estrella Morente, Silvia Pérez Cruz and Yves Tumor, among others. In it, Rosalía sings in up to thirteen languages, although Spanish is the main one.
The newspaper praises Bad Bunny’s new project – who had a successful residency this year in Puerto Rico, under the name ‘No me quiero ir de aquí’ from July to September – and refers to the artist as “the leading theorist of intergenerational exchange in pop”.
The album ‘Debí tirar más fotos’ was named album of the year at the Latin Grammy Awards held last month in Las Vegas, where it finished the night with five gramophones.
“Now more than ever, the future can seem dizzyingly disconnected from the past. So leave it to Bad Bunny, pop’s leading theorist of intergenerational exchange, to create an album so modern and current that it also explicitly roots itself in and defends the joys of tradition. Everything old was also new at the time,” the critics note.
Bad Bunny and Rosalia receive critical acclaim
After a successful year for the urban artist, all the attention is still on the Puerto Rican who in 2026 will be the central figure in the halftime show of the Super Bowl, the most important game of the U.S. Football League, awaited by many and surrounded by criticism by others.
The list could not miss ‘The Life of a Showgirl’ (TLOAS), the twelfth studio album by singer-songwriter Taylor Swift, which, according to Times critics, is perhaps the “most evanescent” album in her catalog.
“‘TLOAS’ does not showcase her work. It simply, and unostentatiously, places her in a particularly carefree moment of showing what she has and how it makes her feel,” they note.
“That means songs about the pleasures of being hated, the pleasures of hating, the pleasures of being the boss, the pleasures of domestic bliss and the pleasures of pleasure,” the newspaper notes.
“There is no obvious consensus selection for the best album of 2025, partly because the release calendar was sparse on notable names and partly because some of the year’s most anticipated albums (among these Swift and Sabrina Carpenter’s) turned out to be disappointing” states the reviewer.
“But that also means it was a great year to discover new artists and dive into more discrete releases, the kind that are likely to inspire more heterogeneous and less predictable year-end lists,” they add, reported Agencia EFE.
Find out more at ‘QueOnnda.com’.