#1 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Rosalía

January 31, 2026 by Royal Stuart in 2025, Top 31

To those of you who’ve hung out with me over the last three months, seeing this jaw-dropping album by Spanish singer / songwriter Rosalía at #1 is likely not a surprise. Sometime in mid-December, my family all made the snap assumption that this would end up being my #1 album of the year, and they weren’t wrong. Some might say I’ve been downright obsessed, but with good reason.

There is nothing available in popular music, of any era or style, like Rosalía’s fourth album, LUX. It’s a testament to the strength and confidence of the artist that she had the power to pull it off at this scale. This album is a modern opera with a full orchestra and pop-music hooks. It’s beautifully written and gorgeously, achingly sung by Rosalía, and features guest appearances of the voices of Björk, Yves Tumor, and Patti Smith; mixing talents by Nigel Godrich; composition from Charlotte Gainsbourg; production from Pharrell Williams; composition and production from Noah Goldstein; orchestration from the London Symphony Orchestra; and literally a hundred more artists and performers who lent their collectively enormous talents to this masterpiece.

LUX is sung mostly in Spanish. Additionally, Rosalía spent three years working with native-born translators, composing and learning passages for her to sing in thirteen (yes, 13) other languages, from English to Japanese to Ukrainian¹. At the album’s center is this angelic voice carrying it all forward, tackling a topic that is equally far-reaching and uber-intimate. As Pitchfork said in their review of the album, “With [Rosalía] as its lodestar, LUX advances like a crusade to conquer the mysteries of human existence.” That‘s all.

At its core, the album is a religious experience, focused on telling the stories of many Sainted and saintly women across time², and using their stories to guide us, question our existence and inform the reasons we carry on through this mortal coil. Within, Rosalía’s voice is otherworldly, and the three albums she’s released prior to this one proved she had the musical chops to pull off something of this scale.

She turned a teenage love of Spanish music into a degree in musicology at the Catalonia College of Music in Barcelona, graduating with honors thanks to her critically-acclaimed debut album Los Ángeles and her sophomore Spanish pop / hip hop / flamenco fusion album El mal querer in 2017 and 2018, respectively. Her third album, Motomami, which also featured production by the likes of Noah Goldstein and Pharrell, and has guest appearances by The Weeknd and Dominican rapper Tokischa, focused on reggaeton beats and experimental Spanish pop. It came out in 2022 and was recognized on a global scale (but had still not broken through my ethnocentric musical leanings).

In 2023, she was featured on “Oral,” by Björk, who both donated their profits from the song as a fundraiser to combat open pen fish farming in Iceland. Rosalía is now 33 (potentially notable as the apparent age of Jesus when he died), and with LUX she has taken the world by storm. Despite only having come out in early November, this album was ranked #1 of the year by Entertainment Weekly, The Guardian, and NPR, seemingly universally loved by critics.

As 98% of the album is sung in a language other than my native English, the listening experience is unlike anything else. I typically love to sing along to songs (ask my wife). I’m no karaoke maestro, but if I even remotely know some of the words in a song I’ll find a way to sing along, deftly mumbling my way through the parts I don’t know, very much like that 30-year-old SNL commercial “Classic Sing-along with the Drunken Asses.” But I’ve butchered my way through the French in “Psycho Killer” and the nonsense European-sounding lyrics at the end of “Sun King” enough to know that trying to gracefully sing along to an album that glides through 14 different languages is another thing entirely.

I do have some non-English albums in my repertoire, but none that I’ve listened to as much as LUX in the past three months (it helps that this was also my 8-year-old’s favorite album of 2025). Being unable to sing along to these songs without feeling like I’m truly doing it a disservice (both lyrically, and sonically, such is Rosalía’s command of her instrument) has been a challenge. It’s resulted in a lot more whistling along, which is also not great (again, ask my wife). So unlike most music I listen to, the singer’s voice becomes another instrument, conveying an emotion, a feeling, without lyrics to guide me. A not dissimilar experience can be had listening to Sigur Rós (#18 in 2023 and #7 in 2012), as lead singer Jónsi (solo at #7 in 2010 as well) sings in Icelandic, English, and a nonsense language he calls Vonlenska. But in Sigur Rós, Jónsi’s voice is often mixed down and unintelligible, blending sonically into the music surrounding it. On LUX, Rosalía is omnipresent, the lead in every sense of the word.

Despite the language barrier, LUX is 60 minutes³ of emotional musical bliss. Each song is a favorite in its own way. “Berghain” (featured in the video above), was the first thing I heard from it, and it hooked me from the very first choral onslaught. Please pause your reading and watch the video above right now. Rosalía sings in a very high register while the symphony and choir sonically dance over, around, and through her. The coda arrives with Björk slowly singing in her unmistakable Icelandic-tinged English “The only way we’ll be saved is divine intervention.” And then Yves Tumor shows up at the very end, shout-quoting Mike Tyson (of all people), “I’ll fuck you till you love me.” It’s jarring and offensive, but matches the Carmina-Burana-like orchestration in the rest of the song. Oh so powerful.

Immediately following that song comes “La Perla,” a much more intricate love story of a song laden with acoustic guitar a butterfly-like flute and swelling strings. I say “love story,” but I can’t say that for sure — there are ways to look at the translation, but it’s much more fun to merely enjoy the lyrics sans translation, letting Rosalía’s tone dictate the story. And that’s probably the most magical part of the listening experience: despite not knowing the words, there’s an emotional quotient conveyed by her voice and the orchestration that tells you everything you need to feel.

For instance, in the delicate “Mio Cristo Piange Diamanti,” we don’t need to know that that title translates to “My Christ Cries Diamonds.” When Rosalía gets to the chorus, the emotional journey you’ve been taken on by her voice and the music tells you “now is when you should cry.” And then, by the end of the song, the vocals and the orchestra builds and builds, coming to an abrupt halt. We then hear Rosalía mid conversation, saying in English “that’s going to be the energy, and then” BRAHNG, humorously conveying to the person she’s talking to, and to us, what is happening to us, live in the song. It’s brilliant.

My current favorite on the album is one of the physical-media-only tracks, “Focu Ranni,” which starts with a robotic auto-tuned sound that evokes Sufjan Steven’s beloved Age of Adz (#3 in 2010). The song sounds more current than some of the more operatic turns on the album, blending digital and stringed sounds together in a way that would never hold together if it weren’t for Rosalía’s voice.

When you find yourself in a place to listen to the whole beautiful album, make sure you’re in an undisturbed space where you can give it your full attention. Headphones are preferable. In addition to the songs mentioned above, pay close attention to “Divinize,” “La Jugular, “Sauvignon Blanc,” and closer “Magnolias.” Each song is a masterpiece unto itself. Together, they are otherworldly.

2025 was an especially rich year for music — I could have easily done a top 50 of the year and still had albums left behind. But there could be no other #1. Not only is LUX the best album of 2025, it’s a strong contender for “album of the century.” Certainly album of the decade. Between this and Geese at #2, it’s nice to know that it’s still possible to experience surprise in music, that not everything is just a rehashing of the past. It leaves me excitedly anticipating what’s going to come out in 2026.

See you next year!

^{1. The fourteen languages for LUX: Arabic, Catalan, English, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Mandarin, Portuguese, Sicilian, Spanish, and Ukrainian.↩}
^{2. Thank god for Wikipedia. The stories of these women factor into the songs across LUX: Saint Rose of Lima Hildegard of Bingen, Vimala (one of the authors of the Buddhist Therīgāthā), Saint Rosalia of Palermo, Saint Teresa of Ávila (Teresa of Jesus), Joan of Arc, Sun Bu'er (of the Taoist Seven Masters of Quanzhen), Prophetess Miriam, Rabia Al-Adawiya, Anandamayi Ma, Ryōnen Gensō, Clare of Assisi, and Saint Olga of Kiev.↩}
^{3. 60 minutes and 18 songs long when listened to via physical media, 50 minutes and 15 songs long when listened to via streaming services. Song 12, “Focu ’Ranni,” 14, “Jeanne,” and 15, “Novia Robot,” can only be heard on CD and vinyl. Additionally, the length of song 10, “Dios Es un Stalker,” is 45 seconds longer on the physical versions, in a higher key and with an additional chorus and bridge.↩}

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#20 on the 2025 Bacon Top 31 — Juana Molina

January 12, 2026 by Royal Stuart in 2025, Top 31

DOGA by Juana Molina

I’m gonna fuck this up. I don’t know how to write about this wonderful musician. I don’t have the depth of knowledge necessary to wax on about a Spanish-singing Argentinian auteur. Or maybe I just don’t have the usual tropes I fall back on? Maybe this is more of a challenge than I’m used to, and that voice in the back of my head is balking at needing to go outside of my comfort zone? Growth at age almost-52 is harder than you might think. Here goes nothing.

Juana Molina is not the kind of artist you’d typically find in the Top 31. Living in Buenos Aires, 64 years old, creating dreamy “folktronica” that she typically sings in her native Spanish – she’s not the typical indie musician I am drawn to by any measure. And yet, with her eighth album DOGA, she’s made what I feel is the 20th best album of 2025.

Molina’s path to college radio play across the world started in 1961, when she was born to a tango-singing father and an actress mother. Unable to make money in a career in music, she focused on the stage, quickly reaching some fame in Argentina as a sketch comedy actress. Apparently in the early 90s she was quite popular across the country, and at the height of her acting career she quit, finally able to turn her focus back to the music that was overwhelming her psyche.

Since releasing her debut album, Rara, in 1996, her climb to recognition outside of Argentina grew slowly. That album did not find an audience in her home country, but she was undeterred. A quick jaunt to Los Angeles allowed her the space to put together her second album, 2000’s Segundo, which caught the attention of David Byrne (see #27, who as you remember founded world-music focused record label Luaka Bop). He asked Molina to open for him on his tour that year. Her audience grew slowly over her next three albums, expanding her global presence into Europe and Japan. Her fifth album, 2008’s Un dia, got an unexpected boost when her music was featured in the background of a Radiolab episode in 2008 titled “Sperm.” Due to an outpouring of inquiries about that music, the popular podcast ran a whole segment featuring Molina in 2009, adding an even greater amount of US-based attention to the singer / songwriter.

Her sixth and seventh albums, 2013’s Wed 21 and 2017’s Halo were well-received, and while I know I had heard of the artist by this time, I still hadn’t given her or her music any attention. Then DOGA came out in November. And this time, thanks to a friend who earlier in the year had forced me to listen to a Juana Molina song¹, I paid closer attention. It may have taken me nearly 30 years to come around, but I’m so glad I finally did.

DOGA is one hell of an album. Molina’s soft-spoken voice sounds to my non-Spanish speaking ears like an additional instrument, delicately laced across the top of intricate, off-kilter, mostly-electronic beats. Hit play on the video for “Desinhumano,” above. I hear what sound like influences of Björk (Icelandic, 60) and The Knife / Fever Ray (Karen Dreijer, Swedish, 50), but as Molina is older than both of those huge, international female artists, I wonder if I should actually be saying they’re influenced by her. I can confidently say if you’ve been a fan of either of those artists in the past, then Juana Molina is right up your alley.

It’s a rare thing to come to an artist for the first time on their 8th album and 30 years into their musical career. Normally at this point, if an artist makes it to their eighth album, they’ve settled into their “only the super fans will dig this” era of their career, no longer able to bring in new fans the way their earlier albums may have. Molina and her album DOGA is clearly different. Hopefully you hear it, too. And I hope this review did justice to her and this fantastic album.

^{1. In January 2025, I created a new way for new music to enter my life. I gathered a small group of friends for the purposes of sharing music between us. We dubbed it “Record Cabinet,” and decided to gather every ~6 weeks or so and bring two songs to share based on a theme as established by that session’s host. For the October “Foreign Exchange” theme, a friend (hi Brent!) brought the Juana Molina song “El Perro” from Segundo as his song representative of “a song from the Southern Hemisphere. I love all the different ways new music can make it to my ears.↩}

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#31 on the 2022 Bacon Top 31 — FKA twigs

January 01, 2023 by Royal Stuart in Top 31

Welcome to the fourteenth annual Bacon Top 31. 14! At the completion of this list, I’ll have written a blog post for 436 albums since I began back in 2009. And I still look forward to writing and sharing my top albums, every year. It’s likely because I don’t write throughout the rest of the year. Rather, I listen. My music consumption remains as active as ever: I constantly seek out new albums, and I’m almost always listening to the album I most recently found. The act of collating, ordering, writing about and weighing each against the others as well as the events of the year that led them to be loved by me hits many different pleasure points in my brain.

14 years as an amount of time feels relatively short, until you really start to examine what has transpired in the interim. In 2009, for instance, Barack Obama was inaugurated as the 44th US president and Michael Jackson died; Captain Philips’ cargo ship was boarded by pirates and Captain Sully Sullenberger landed his plane safely in the Hudson River (both stories were recreated as movies with Tom Hanks in the lead, in 2013 and 2016, respectively). In 2009, the iPhone 3GS was released, Facebook had not quite reached 500 million users (they’re now at nearly 3 billion users monthly), and Instagram had not even been invented yet!

That’s enough about the past, let’s get back to the present. For the next 31 days I’ll be counting down my favorite albums from 2022. I hope you read and listen alongside me, confirm or deny your own preferences against mine, and find some new music you hadn’t yet heard. Let’s get to it.

CAPRISONGS by FKA twigs

By the time Tahliah Debrett Barnett, otherwise known as FKA twigs, released her first official recording, 2012’s EP1, at 24, she’d been making a name for herself as a backup dancer in music videos, for the likes of Kylie Minogue, Jessie J, and Ed Sheeran. EP1 had four songs, and a year later, EP2 came out with an additional four songs. Twigs learned early on how to channel the raw energy that comes from dancing in sex-and-image-first videos into her own music: she produced a video for each of those eight songs on the first two EPs, understanding the influence those visuals could have on her listening world.

In 2014 she released her first full length, LP1, which was the #10 album that year. That album had twigs singing in her signature falsetto, softly and intimately as if she’s lying next to you on the same pillow, with her lips next to your ear. CAPRISONGS is much more forward, more bold.

The album is technically a mixtape, but don’t look to me to define the difference between that and an album — I tried to figure it out, but failed. Twigs brings the term to the fore by peppering the album with the sounds of a cassette tape being loaded and a tangible, tactile PLAY button being pushed. Perhaps calling this a mixtape rather than an album is the easiest way twigs could break her own mold. Her falsetto is still there, but so, too, is her naturally-unaffected voice, sometimes pushed through machine modification, sometimes angrily barked. Many guest singers and rappers appear alongside twigs throughout the record: Pa Salieu, Dystopia, Rema, Daniel Caesar, Jorja Smith, and Unknown T all make an appearance. The Shygirl fueled “papi bones” is a personal favorite, with its driving, dance-heavy beat that demands the listener move their body. The Weeknd makes the biggest splash on the album, with the duet “tears in the club” featured in the video above.

fka Twigs is an enigma, a blend of beat-heavy indie pop, avant garde artistry, and primal urge. She flourishes at the intersection of Björk (artistic musical expression), Grimes (indie dance yumminess), and The Knife/Fever Ray’s Karin Dreijer (thrill and horror imagery), and if you like any one of those artists then you’ll feel right at home with CAPRISONGS. Seek it out at the links below, and then check back in tomorrow for something entirely different.

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#21 on the 2017 Bacon Top 31

January 11, 2018 by Royal Stuart

Plunge by Fever Ray

And now for the strangest (and probably more divisive than Kendrick Lamar, musically) entry on the 2017 Top 31: Fever Ray. If you like Fever Ray, the band, then you’ve probably already latched onto this album and are loving it. If you don’t know who Fever Ray is, then prepare to be equally angered, frightened, and dumbfounded by what you’re about to hear. Maybe you’ll like it, maybe you won’t.

Fever Ray is the stage name of Karin Dreijer Andersson, who is half of the famed Swedish electronic brother-sister duo The Knife. The Knife had some amazing albums when they were together, and now Fever Ray carries the Swedish dark electronic torch. And boy does it get dark.

Her eponymous debut album made #18 on the 2009 Top 31, and here we are eight years later with Plunge. Andersson has a unique sound and voice that is unmistakably hers, and Plunge is no different. But within the album, she seems to be pushing things further, into more difficult territory, similarly to what Björk has been doing on her last few albums. But while Björk has managed to find a zone that is completely unlistenable to me, Fever Ray manages to pull it off a little bit better.

I only cringe a little when I’m listening to Plunge. But I do make a point to make sure no children are within earshot, as the music can get quite vulgar in addition to the darkness, with lines like that from the song “This Country,” which has the lovely line “This house makes it hard to fuck” and “This country makes it hard to fuck” repeated over and over and over again.

Fever Ray’s visual output is every bit as dark and interesting as the audio. The video above, for the song “To the Moon and Back,” you’ll notice, is labeled “Part III.” That’s because there were two disturbing, minute-long shorts that were released prior to the video (Part I: Switch Seeks Same and Part II: A New Friend).

I believe I’ll continue to listen and be intrigued by Fever Ray for the entirety of her musical career. And I doubt I’ll ever feel at ease about it. And somehow that’s a good thing.

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22. DAMN. by Kendrick Lamar
23. Capacity by Big Thief
24. The Tourist by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
25. CCFX EP by CCFX
26. Woodstock by Portugal. The Man
27. MASSEDUCTION by St. Vincent
28. On the Spot by Hot 8 Brass Band
29. A Deeper Understanding by The War on Drugs
30. Planetarium by Sufjan Stevens, Nico Muhly, Bryce Dessner, & James McAlister
31. A Moment Apart by Odesza

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2009-2016 Top 31s

November 13, 2012 by Royal Stuart

Bjӧrk, “Mutual Core,” from last year’s Biophilia, of which the official remix album Bastards comes out next week.

(do check out that home page when you get a chance. It’s bizarrely beautiful.)