Bad Bunny’s ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ is the best album of the year for Rolling Stone magazine, while Rosalía’s ‘Lux’ is in third place. Between the two, Lady Gaga’s ‘Mayhem’.
“The album and his dominance this year are a testament to how far Bad Bunny can take his unwavering Puerto Rican pride,” says the magazine, which published its traditional list of the year’s top 100 albums on Wednesday.
Bad Bunny’s sixth album “is local, upbeat and fresh” as the Puerto Rican “takes the best moments from ‘Un verano sin ti’ – his fourth album, from 2022 – and pushes the boundaries of his continually experimental sound into the uncharted territory of Puerto Rican folk music and salsa,” the magazine highlights.
“Despite its hyper-specific cultural approach, or perhaps because of it, ‘DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS’ has conquered 2025. It could be heard on the streets of New York, in San Juan and beyond, and helped Bad Bunny make history.”
As for Rosalía, he assures that the Spaniard “has proven to be pop’s most provocative agent of chaos and ‘Lux’ sounds like no other in music today”.
Rolling Stone highlights the “irreverence” of ‘Lux’ as a reason why “it’s so affecting”: “It drinks from the greats, but leans into Mozart with a villainess-like energy or Bach with a joint in his mouth.”
“Ultimately, the album succeeds because each song is deeply thoughtful and profoundly sincere, lacing it with heady ideas around what the hell we’re doing here. She grapples with grief and loss, anger and mourning, sex and desire, love and adoration, as she tries to better understand who she is, the way she loves and the spiritual forces that move her,” the write-up culminates.
Ahead of ‘Lux’ is Lady Gaga’s ‘Mayhem’, which takes second place with what Rolling Stone calls “the most powerful pop album of the year”. A work in which appears the “most authentic version” of the artist, who embraces essential sounds in one of the “most ambitious and diverse albums of her career”.
The top 10 is rounded out by Dijon’s ‘Baby’, Geese’s ‘Getting Killed’, Clipse’s ‘Let God Sort Em Out’, Tyler Childers’ ‘Snipe Hunter’, Wednesday’s ‘Bleeds’, Hayley Williams’ ‘Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party’ and Playboi Carti’s ‘Music’.
Sabrina Carpenter, one of the most popular singers of the moment, ranks 13th with ‘Man’s Best Friend’, while Taylor Swift is at 15th, with ‘The Life Of A Showgirl’ just ahead of Mexico’s Silvana Estrada, with ‘Vendrán suaves lluvias’.
The 28-year-old Mexican singer-songwriter’s second album features “exquisite orchestrations with wind and string instruments” in a self-produced album “of extraordinary tenderness, evoking the troubadour spirit of Latin giants such as Silvio Rodríguez and Mercedes Sosa”.
In 34th place is Karol G, with her ‘Tropicoqueta’. “Where exactly does an artist go after a record-breaking, global, impressive success?”, asks the magazine. And what did the Colombian singer do is “think about all the music that had inspired her in her childhood: baroque ballads from the eighties, vibrant vallenatos, merengues from parties in her family’s living rooms in Medellín”.
“A brilliant compendium of 20 songs, all drawn from different parts of Latin pop history, with an emphasis on pop. What he achieves is light-hearted and fresh, interested in accessibility and connection, stretching out like a mosaic of past and present.”
Also appearing in the top 50 is Spain’s Guitarricadelafuente, at 46th, with ‘Spanish Leather’, “one of the most exciting and adventurous albums of the year”, and Puerto Rico’s Maria Zardoya at 48th with her first solo work, ‘Melt’, “more dreamy and intimate than the jazz-tinged pop of her band”, The Marias.
And in 50th place, reported Agencia EFE, the Mexican-American regional Mexican music band Fuerza Regida, with ‘111Xpantia’, a “return to the group’s classic sound” with an album that consolidates the group.
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