November 15, 2025

by Ann Powers

This week, our critic emerges from the storm of adulation that greeted the Spanish innovator Rosalia’s latest album, Lux, with some thoughts about the long history of pop music that deploys orchestral tendencies.

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Hello ultraromantics,

Like most lovers of wildly ambitious, even grandiose musical passion projects, I was thrilled when the Spanish singer/polyglot/visionary Rosalía released “Berghain,” the first song from her fourth album Lux. This aria mourning lost love was saturated in swooniness, and the video — a supernatural melodrama that has its star being pulled by her emotions from her religious icon-adorned home to a hospital, a pawn shop where she tries to sell her tarnished heart (well, a locket), and a mysterious room where she recreates this scene from Snow White. Most strikingly, as she makes her rounds Rosalia is trailed by what appears to be a chamber orchestra and a choir — the most unwieldy and charismatic demon a musician has conjured since Björk (who has a “Berghain” vocal cameo) debuted her giant stuffed bear for “Human Behaviour.”

The string section is the backbone of Lux, the album she released a bit more than a week after “Berghain" hit. Arriving just as music writers are calculating their year-end favorites, Lux was greeted with appropriately Catholic levels of ecstasy by music aficionados, inspiring panegyrics akin to those accorded Bad Bunny’s Debi Tirar Más Fotos in January. (It’s going to be interesting to see who ends up at the top of more best of 2025 lists.)

One way to look at 2025 in mainstream music is through the vista created by these two peaks, separated by a valley strewn with mildly praised or mostly scorned stuff from other global pop dominators. (You know: manchildren, showgirls, monsters.) There is no doubt that the superstars of Latin music are taking chances their Anglo peers aren’t attempting, and it’s paying off. In Rosalía's case, those stalking violins and clarinets signal a fresh take on a time-honored method of raising the stakes: going symphonic. (I think it’s silly to nit pick, but also agree with New York Times editor Joshua Barone that Lux is a collection of art songs rather than an actual symphony or opera. I’m always trying to get people to acknowledge that the art song is still a going concern!)

Lux is certainly a thrilling listen, but as a concept album built on orchestral arrangements, it’s not singular in 2025, let alone within pop history. I’m not an expert on Latin music — I always turn to my brilliant Alt.Latino colleagues Felix Contreras and Anamaria Sayre for recommendations — but I did notice that Rosalia joined two of my longtime favorites in releasing strings-driven projects this year. Lido Pimienta’s stunning La Belleza, a collaboration with producer Owen Pallett and the Medellin Philharmonic Orchestra, shares Lux’s intensity, but instead of considering romance through the passions of the saints as Rosalía does, Pimienta connects it to other fruitful lineages, both familial and communal. Its marriage of folk idioms and high concepts recalls two of my favorite albums — Milton Nascimento’s Missa dos Quilombos and Mary Lou Williams’ Black Christ of the Andes.

Compared with La Belleza’s political bent and Sunday morning energy, Mon Laferte’s Femme Fatale follows a blue-lit torch deep into the midnight hours, as the moment’s reigning attitudinal chanteuse fully indulges her love for torch songs. If I had to name an elemental substance defining both Lux and La Balleza, it would be blood-tinged tears; for Femme Fatale it’s the smoke of a cigarette in an ivory holder, mingling with tequila spilled on a mahogany bar. Here, the strings don’t lift the spirit; they cultivate the libido, persuading listeners to relax into decadent reverie.

Between the dimly lit nightclubs where couples embrace and the church rafters, there’s a lot of room for strings to define and enhance a pop artist’s vision. A walk back through time reveals the changing meanings of orchestral pop. When I first heard Lux I was emerging from a few days of research into the career of Nat King Cole, whose lush hits dominated the charts in the 1940s and 1950s. Cole’s evolution, strikingly, contradicted the path that enlisting an orchestra represents for Rosalía: Instead of signifying an (arguably pretentious) artistic leap, his work with strings marked a step away from more “legitimate” jazz toward music that his critics called middlebrow. That’s how different pop was 75 years ago — coming out of the big band era, when orchestral hits soundtracked everything from a fun night out to an easy-listening cocktail party in the suburbs, a tight little band felt more authentic and less sentimental.

Orchestral music fell out of favor in the early years of the rock era, until that genre’s legendary auteurs began bending it to the “teenage symphonies to God” (in Brian Wilson’s famous description) that catapulted rock toward the sublime. Phil Spector and The Beatles (working with George Martin) set the template for explorations that eventually became pretty overblown.

I remember when my fifth grade teacher, the macramé vest-wearing Ms. Schmidt, brought her favorite prog rock album into class; we Catholic kids were dumbstruck by the grandeur of the Moody Blues’ by-then vintage work The Days of Future Past, though a smart aleck did quickly commander her turntable during recess to play a smuggled-in single, Elton John’s “The Bitch Is Back,” to the kids’ amusement and the school principal’s horror. (Ms. Schmidt only lasted one year at Our Lady of Fatima.) Mr. Crocodile Rock loved a strings-y groundswell himself, working with the master arranger Paul Buckmaster — whose CV is simply amazing — on soft rock mind-blowers like “Levon” and “Madman Across the Water.” Elton’s balladry was a key weapon in my largely unsuccessful childhood campaign to convince my Duke Ellington-loving parents that rock was anything but risqué trash. Those big arrangements helped him achieve superstardom, but as he hit his apex, cooler musical heads were starting to denounce orchestral rock as blowsy and embarrassing.

In rock and pop circles, as in jazz, that symphonic sound could signify both the height of ambition and the depths of commercial schlock. That paradox reigned for decades, through disco, where the Latin big band the Salsoul Orchestra defined classiness alongside others like the Love Unlimited Orchestra and “Kung Fu Fighting” mastermind Biddu Appaiah’s Eurodisco ensembles.

Things got complicated in the 1980s with the advent of synthesizers; suddenly a few flipped switches could emulate the living, breathing (and costly) organisms that had pushed rock and soul-oriented pop past its usual borders. When divas like Whitney Houston and Cèline Dion roamed the earth, big arrangements took on a Vegas sheen that dripped money and melodrama. Millions loved this; snobs considered it tacky. This was also the era of tenor-dominated popera set into motion by Luciano Pavarotti, the crossover star whom Rosalía told my colleague Anamaria was her grandmother’s musical crush, introducing her to the repertoire that she would later filter through her flamenco sensibility to make Lux.

And so the meanings of orchestral pop pinged back and forth like an ostinato plucked on a violin. Sometimes it hit people’s ears as corny; sometimes, exquisite. As music moved toward the 21st century, though, a new dynamic began establishing itself. Younger classical musicians like the founders of the Kronos Quartet exploded the classical canon with forays into rock, while pop stars, many with some classical training, sharpened the edges on their more symphonic arrangements. PJ Harvey’s “Man-Sized Sextet” and Massive Attack’s “Unfinished Sympathy” were dark and trippy, not sweet. In this new space, expansive thinkers like Björk made art rock cool again.

Could their adventures veer toward the self-indulgent? Sure — have you heard of The Decemberists? In general, though, orchestral pop in the 1990s and after meaningfully united musicians across a wide spectrum rather than mostly adding fancy frosting to standard pop songs. Joanna Newsom, Radiohead and later, Frank Ocean and FKA Twigs are only a few of the many innovators redefining the connection. Their efforts paid off. Even when a band like Coldplay, eternally on the knife’s edge of schlock, employed orchestral instruments, it wasn't the strings that made things cringey. Meanwhile, in the classical realm, younger players and composers insisted that incorporating non-canonical elements into their repertoire would only enrich, not dilute, the tradition.

This is the arena Rosalía enters with Lux. Working with the groundbreaking composer Caroline Shaw, among others, she takes it for granted that listeners will hear the rigor and depth in her musical approach; ostentatiously employing more than a dozen languages to tell her tale of erotic desolation through the stories of the Catholic saints, she somehow avoids camp — even the serious style of camp that Almodovar has often employed — by dwelling in that rigor, her voice showing the fruits of her discipline.

Channeling the legacy of art pop through the lens of Latinidad, she again opens up the conversation about canons, crossover and what constitutes seriousness. The album that Lux reminds me of the most, though its strings are mostly sampled, set the high mark for artistic ambition in this age of global music grounded in personal identities: Lemonade, Beyoncé’s richly mythic tale of personal betrayal driven by historical forces of dehumanization and oppression. Like that album, this one was received like a bolt from heaven. It’s clear that listeners long for these kinds of divine interventions.

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Here are a few things that made my heart zing this week

No recent cinematic experience has plucked at my heartstrings as much as You Got Gold, the documentary celebrating John Prine’s music through the lens of the tribute concerts his beloved community staged after his death at Nashville’s Ryman Auditorium. Every star in this film — and there are plenty, including Bonnie Raitt, Brandi Carlile, Tyler Childers, Lucinda Williams, Dwight Yoakam and Bob Weir — was also a friend of John’s, and their testimonies to his gentle genius combine with their renditions of his songs to make the film unforgettable. It’s screening in select markets now and opens wide right around Thanksgiving. Check your local listings and this website for showtimes; it would make for a perfect Thanksgiving weekend family watch.
Prine’s classic duet with Iris Dement “In Spite of Ourselves” has been popping up in a lot of movies — most recently, in Lynne Ramsay’s latest wild slice of life Die My Love. I’m a Ramsay stan, and was thrilled to be plunged back into one of her hallucinatory stories. If you love Ramsay’s work the way I do, you’ll be thrilled to read this in-depth interview conducted when her great film Morvern Callar was released, recently reposted on substack by its author, Ray Pride. And from Edith Bowman, here’s a great podcast conversation with Ramsay and music supervisor Raife Burchill about the stunningly great Die My Love soundtrack.
Back in 2012, NPR Music's then-jazz writer Patrick Jarenwattananon introduced me to an amazing singer named Theo Bleckmann, whose latest album dared to approach the songbooks my number one fave, Kate Bush. We discussed Bleckmann’s foray for this site, and from then on I was a major fan of the German-born, New York City-dwelling artist, too. Bleckmann has finally returned to Bush’s catalog on his latest album — and goes beyond, from Baroque gospel to disco to an absolutely mind-blowing reimagining of a Beatles chestnut. The new disc is called Love and Anger (after Kate) and it will astonish you.
As 2025 draws to a close, I’m already looking for voices that might carry me through 2026. Here are songs by two emerging singer-songwriters I’ll be watching next year: Nashville’s Jessie Gray and Galwegian Dove Ellis.
I don’t know about your family, but as winter approaches this year we keep catching colds. If you’re a meat eater, I’m here to tell you this early COVID-era ground pork soup really heals all ills.

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