Rosalía – the first Spanish female artist to reach the top 5 Official UK Album Charts.
Credit: Christian Bertrand, Shutterstock
Rosalía has made UK chart history this week as her new album LUX entered the Official Albums Chart at number four – the highest position ever achieved by a Spanish female artist. According to the Official Charts Company, no Spanish woman has ever reached the UK top five, making this a landmark breakthrough for both the artist and Spanish music in Britain.
The moment comes during a female-dominated few weeks in the UK chart’s upper ranks, with Taylor Swift, Olivia Dean and Lily Allen holding the top positions. Rosalía’s arrival makes her the first Spanish woman to join the top five.
On release day, LUX also broke another milestone, amassing around 42.1 million Spotify streams – the most streams in a single day for a Spanish-language female artist.
A cross-genre statement of ambition
For those who have heard it, the album’s triumphant debut is hardly surprising. LUX is a bold, genre-blending work that merges orchestral arrangements, choral passages, multilingual songwriting and Rosalía’s signature vocal control into something far bigger than a traditional pop release. She sings across more than a dozen languages – including English, Spanish, Catalan, Japanese, Portuguese and Latin – while shifting between flamenco, opera, chamber music and contemporary electronic production.
Her meticulous attention to detail gives the album an emotional and cinematic scale that stands apart from anything else released this year.
LUX – From sainthood to fickle manhood
LUX (“light”) announces its intentions immediately. The opening track places listeners inside a cavernous church hall, with a distant piano and a single breath from Rosalía that lands unexpectedly in the foreground. It sets a tone of contemplation that runs through the record, shaped by themes of faith, devotion and the complexities of human relationships.
From choral interludes to flamenco-infused rhythms on De Madrugá, the album moves between eras and genres with deliberate precision. In an interview with Apple Music, Rosalía said she spent three years writing LUX, dedicating most of that time to studying sainthood across cultures and refining lyrics that leave nothing unsaid.
This honesty comes through during the entirety of the album, especially in tracks like La Perla where she confronts a man she calls a “peace-thief”, adding that he “finally goes to therapy, the psychologist and psychiatrist, but what’s the use when he lies more than he speaks?”
Critics hail a boundary-pushing masterpiece
Since its release, LUX has earned widespread international acclaim. The Guardian praised it as “a distinctive clash of classical and chaos that couldn’t be by anyone else.” Rolling Stone described it as “unlike anything else in contemporary pop.” AP News called it “a demanding but rewarding listen that positions her as a unique voice in modern music.”
On Metacritic, LUX currently holds one of the highest scores of 2025, marking it as Rosalía’s strongest critical success.
Why this UK record matters
Although Spanish-language music has seen global success in recent years, the UK market has traditionally been difficult for non-English albums to break into at the very top. The success of LUX – a multilingual, concept-driven album rooted in classical structures – signals a meaningful shift. It is a huge symbolic breakthrough for Spanish woman in music, and reflects a growing openness to ambitious, cross-cultural projects in the UK.
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