Rosalía marked the first anniversary of LUX by sharing a playlist of 1,000 songs she listened to while imagining, making and presenting the album. The selection includes Kate Bush, Lou Reed, Aphex Twin, Arthur Russell and John Cale. In an accompanying letter, she wrote about the pace of the past year and the attention it takes to stop and put an experience into words.
There was room for a piano or a desk in the bedroom Rosalía had as a teenager. She chose the piano, which is one of the reasons she remembers learning to write while lying on her bed. The detail appears in a letter she published on November 7, a year after LUX came out. It explains how she likes to write and why finding a moment to do it has been difficult lately.
The letter comes with a playlist. Its title, “1.000 TEMAS QUE TE DAN LUX,” announces the scale of what she is sharing. The thousand tracks cover music she listened to as she imagined, made and presented her fourth album. That description gives the selection a longer timespan than the recording sessions. A song could have accompanied Rosalía while an idea was still forming or while she was taking the finished work out into the world.
Kate Bush, Lou Reed, Aphex Twin, Arthur Russell and John Cale are among the artists listeners will find. The names give a sense of the different places the playlist can go. Someone who enters through a voice they recognise may end up in a stretch of electronic music or spend time with a songwriter they have never listened to. At this length, the list can also be approached in sections, with different points of entry on different days.
The way Rosalía introduces it leaves those choices open. A playlist made public after an album can look like an invitation to trace influences. In this case, her account makes room for a track that simply kept her company. The act of listening continued through several phases of the work, and she has given no track-by-track account of what made its way into the recording. The collection is a record of time spent with music as well as a guide to things she likes.
She called the letter “Dar a Lux,” a play on the Spanish expression dar a luz, which can mean giving birth and carries a literal reference to light. The title gives her a way to write about releasing an album and finding herself a year away from the event. LUX was released on November 7, 2025, through Columbia Records. The anniversary allowed her to consider what the year had felt like from inside it.
Rosalía opened by acknowledging that it had been a while since she had written a letter of this kind. Movement can help her think, she explained, but there is a point at which too much of it makes writing impossible. The image of lying down to write is her answer to that pace. It gives the letter a quiet physical setting before she moves on to the travel and encounters that have made 2026 feel so fast.
Cathedrals were among the images on her mind while she was conceiving LUX. They gave her a way to picture a space in which music, light and the feeling of something larger could coexist. In the anniversary letter, those memories of the project sit beside her account of the year that followed. The thoughts she had before the record and the experiences she had after it are both part of what the playlist reaches back through.
She described the period as one of the most difficult and meaningful of her life. The letter considers the people she has met and the different ways they express affection. That thought leads naturally to the act of sharing what she has been listening to. A list of songs is something a reader can take away from the letter and use independently, whether or not they know the story behind a particular selection.
The contrast in scale is striking. LUX is a single album with a running order that Rosalía chose. The playlist is expansive enough to spend many sessions inside, and the letter gives readers permission to follow it according to their own interests. Someone can hear a few tracks and come back to the album with another sound in mind. Someone else may follow one artist from the list without returning to the record at all.
For Rosalía, the playlist marks the year through listening rather than setting out another release schedule. She has given people a specific way to spend time with the anniversary, with a thousand tracks available to start from and a letter about what it took to sit still long enough to write. A listener can pick a song, then decide where to go when it ends.
