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We're going to try our best, sport. CMAT's Euro-Country for littlerhymes  and Rosalía's Lux, for same and recognito .

Both these albums are full of incredible musical hybrid vigor. That's not a fair use of the term, as plenty of genre mashups are bad. These are not. These are so, so good. I'm grateful for the chance to talk about both, because I love them. I haven't done much research into their making, or even CMAT and Rosalía themselves, and I know next to nothing about music theory so my understanding of both albums is limited, I just really like them. 

I really like all of Euro-Country, but I think it might be easiest to talk it via two of my favorite songs on the album, "When A Good Man Cries," and "The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station." "Good Man" is a country song. It starts out with a country fiddle. It has a swing on it. Thompson croons twangily while taking herself to task for making a guy cry. And then, in the last third of the song, as the production thickens, she starts wailing, against her own voice in descant, Kyrie Eleison! It about knocked me out of my seat. In a country song? In a COUNTRY song? And it sounds absolutely at home. Even with the descant, which is pulled straight from Catholic mass, it sounds at home. It makes me crazy. What a fucking bridge. What a fucking ending. 

"The Jamie Oliver Petrol Station" is formed much in the same way, in that it builds from a clear thesis (she was at the Jamie Oliver Petrol Station, and god she hates him, but okay, don't be a bitch, the man's got kids and he wouldn't like this) to an inescapable musical explosion that blows my head off. But through all this she's doing crazy little things with rhythm--the FEAR and the FREEdom of BEing RE/leasedagain to FEEl svnTEEnagin--and also being really lyrically and logically hard to follow. She's got this incredibly clear thesis in the chorus, and then she keeps saying things like "Let me explain though," and "This is making no sense to the average listener," and "I'm still not explaining myself very well at all, let me try, let me try, let me try," and the whole thing's build suddenly is not about having a mantra about not being a bitch for no reason, it's about needing one, about feeling like you're flying apart at the seams where there aren't seams, and that's what the drums are doing. It rules. 

The whole album slides in and out of this kind of legibility to self and listener and illegibility to self and listener, and most of them are doing more than one thing at once. I really really want to see her live, if I can.

Rosalía, however, I've probably lost my chance. I could theoretically see her in a stadium sometime, but I don't really care for stadiums, so. Alas. This is a very tortured transition. Anyway! 

God I love Lux. The first time I listened to it, I stopped what I was doing by like the seventh song to just lie on my bed and cry due to being Artistically Moved. I looked up several publications' best albums of 2025, and I was shocked that it wasn't in almost anyone's top 10. I still don't know how that's possible. I can't listen to Lux and do other things because (Jenny Slate voice) it makes me too crazy.

Much has been made of the number of languages featured on Lux, (Rosalía sings in 13), but it's not just the languages. It's the styles. (puts face in hands and screams) Sorry. Sorry. I'm trying to be normal, I just keep listening to the tracks to have something clear to say and it's not actually helping----god. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. The range of this fucking album. It's got house music. It's got flamenco. It's got Italian arias. It's got Wagner. It's got spoken word. "Berghain," the one that Bjork is on, is the first track I heard and an incredible example. It comes right after the Italian aria and starts with an orchestra, like being slapped in the face. Then we get the Wagnerian chorus sung by an actual chorus, chanting in German that his fear is my fear, his rage is my rage. Like being slapped in the face. Then Rosalía comes on in possibly the highest soprano we've heard from her, and her descant is another slap. Bjork and Yves Tumor's entrances to the song are no less shocking and no less successful. It is an incredible feat of operatic maximalism and it is still somehow in conversation with a pop song. And it's not even my favorite song on the album!!!! 

I also love "La Perla," the slower, somehow-playful breakup ballad that follows "Berghain" and which is such a change of tempo and performance it's like what the FUCK; "Reliqia," a sparkling, somehow triumphant-sounding piece about losing pieces of yourself and becoming a holy relic; "Mio Christo Piange Diamanti," the aforementioned Italian aria she wrote at least in part for her classical-music-loving Grandmother, and in which she uses her ability to span trembling pianissimo to firm vibrato; "Dios Es Un Stalker," a chamber-pop-salsa depiction of love from the divine's watching eye... It's a good album, Brent.