Cultural highlights 2025: Dafydd Owain, Eve & Sera, Radiohead and Rosalía

Stephen Price

2025 has been an extraordinary year for music, with a return to big, cultural-moment-grabbing albums – from Lily Allen’s critically acclaimed West End Girl to a back-on-form release for Gaga and more. But one truly global album stands head and shoulders above the rest for me and many others – the sublime Lux from Rosalía.

In an article from the Irish Times titled, You don’t have to understand every word of artists such as Rosalía and Gwenno to love them, Laura Slattery has high praise (as do most critics) for Rosalía’s genre-defying opus, and ties in the politics behind singing in minority, or other, languages, mentioning Gwenno’s defiant use of Cornish and Welsh, and the rise of Kneecap.

She writes: “With Gwenno I like the mystery. Although her Cornish and Welsh albums come with printed English translations, I’ve only ever scanned them.

“Sometimes there’s nothing more liberating than listening to someone singing in a language that will never be fully knowable.”

And that, there, is the beauty of music we can never fully know.

The delving, the decoding, the listening on repeat. Bliss

The other day, I impressed myself by singing along to Pensiero Stupendo (The Roisin Murphy version that is), despite knowing very few meanings of the words, but loving it all the more for its pure, undiluted beauty. I of course know what it’s about (ahem), but the overall unfamiliarity makes it even more potent.

In Lux, we aren’t treated to just one other language than English, however, we get a total of 14 languages across 18 tracks. From Catalan to Sicilian, Hebrew to Arabic, it shouldn’t be as accessible as it is, but the irony is, its wide use of languages is exactly what makes it everyone’s.

We aren’t ‘dumbed-down’ to either.

The subject matter, in her words, explores the “emotional arc of feminine mystique, transformation, and transcendence,” – inspired by historical female saints and mystics (like Hildegard of Bingen, Teresa of Ávila) and figures from different cultures, reflecting on salvation, desire, and mortality (and some very earthly allusions to her ex lover).

It’s a very special album indeed. And the American and English domination of the world’s airwaves looks to finally be cracking. Who saw that coming!

Radiohead x Hamlet

Closer to home, but not quite on home soil yet, a trip to the beautiful Stratford-upon-Avon to see one of the most extraordinary live performances I have ever seen, namely Hamlet Hail to the Thief, is another musical highlight of the year. ‘A frenetic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet haunted by Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief.’

And I say “ever” wholeheartedly, not the “everything is amazing” style social media reviewers have nowadays, as they eat the “best burger on earth”, or whatever it might be.

I’ve seen some shows in my time, but this marriage of an overlooked album in Radiohead’s repertoire and Hamlet was a spectacle like no other.

Like many, my familiarity with Shakespeare is entwined with enforced reading in school, when it all felt like another inaccessible language. But an older head, a more contemplative head, left to see that it ain’t all that different after all, can see much to admire – no doubt helped along the way by a handful of classic modern movies.

This fresh, thrilling take on Hamlet offered new insights to a story perhaps overtold. It also felt eerily as though the album needed to lay dormant for as long as it did. And for the repeated plays, like many of Shakespeare’s words, to wash over me until the very right time.

This was its time.

If it tours, I’ll see you there. Or maybe I’ll be wise and leave this memory untouched and untainted.

Moving, affecting, important, sublime. Thom and Will make a very good duo.

But now, to the land of my fathers and mothers…

Dafydd Owain’s dark and divine ‘Ymarfer Byw’

Those who read my cultural pieces will have spotted a theme, perhaps, not too well hidden, and that’s a leaning towards the female artist.

Looking at rundowns of this year from other platforms, it seems I’m not alone, and like literature, women are having their moment and time in the sun. Which is not to say there hasn’t been much from the boyos, but has it so regularly stopped my breath, given goosebumps, ‘broken the law’ with its formula?

Like Rosalia’s album, the innovation and ripping of rule-books seems to be at its most potent (to me anyway) with female artists in 2025. If we’ve heard it before, we don’t need it again, and again, and again. Like a still life, so much is safe, clever, inside the lines.

Out with the drum, guitar setup, and songs about love and heartache. In with the other.

That I didn’t find time to review Ymarfer Byw by Dafydd Owain, then, will be my biggest regret this year. But dealing with my dad’s death, the fallout, my foggy brain, and simply staying afloat have been tough enough.

And, judging by this brilliant, brilliant album, I think this most understatedly incredible modern Welsh artist might have been in a similar headframe during its creation.

The album came with little fanfare, and I noticed very early on the omission in its write-up. Dafydd didn’t say too much, but listening to the music, we can feel everything.

We can learn much from omission. From the unsaid. The unsaid is a master of betrayal.

I’ve been heartened to see so many Welsh speakers and learners take the album to their hearts too – quietly sharing it early on, adding it to Instagram images or reels. And it feels like, just as Hail to the Thief did, it’ll find its right audience at the right time – and boy, when it finds you, it finds you.

Dafydd, in his quiet promotion, his humble approach to the mechanics of the PR machine, recently shared that there has been a limited release on vinyl which I urge you to buy while you can. In a ‘down with fast fashion’ approach, I firmly believe his commitment to Ymarfer Byw, and its slow growth, will ensure it goes down as one of the most important albums from Wales this decade.

He shared: “The title itself reflects the idea that we’re all essentially “practising life.” It’s both our first and last time doing it—and that’s the strange beauty of it all.

“My hope is that, despite the darker tones, people can find some light in these songs. As Nick Cave once said, “Hope is optimism with a broken heart.”

Only through confronting the dark, can we fully mend.

And in facing darkness head on, we can all share in this moving, honest and healing piece of work.

Eve Goodman and Sera’s deeply special ‘Natur’

An album I did ensure I reviewed, however, like the two to follow was another that dealt with the fragility and beauty, the light and dark, of life.

Presenting your music to the world is a vulnerable thing that few outside of the art world will know. Reviewers and critics, and now social media users, are quick to attack, to point out how they would have done it, how such and such a thing is wrong, how it’s all up for debate and ripping apart.

Personally, I take the approach forced upon Thumper in Disney’s Bambi: if it’s not for me, if I can’t say something nice, I’ll say nothing at all (in public anyway). Who are we to take anyone down, considering the years spent toiling to make an album or book?

Reviewing, to me at least, feels pressured. Have I got this right? What does my opinion matter anyway?

I listened, and listened and listened again, as I do, and I hope I did do it justice, but only listening to it for yourself, and getting under its skin, can cast the correct spell.

I’ve digressed so much, but with reason. I could review it again, or cut and paste, but all I wish to say is that I adore this album, I really do. And like Dafydd’s Ymarfer Fyw, approaching as I grieved, feeling a little lost (still a little lost, always a little lost), I felt kinship.

I felt colouring outside the lines.

I felt something timeless and important.

I felt reminded of the cyclical nature of nature, and of our need to let be healed through its embrace.

This blink-of-an-eye glimpse of existence we have, that we take for granted until it’s often much too late, offers infinite beauty. And the best of it, the most rewarding of it, is on our doorstep, waiting to hold our hands again.

If you’re not (yet!) a Welsh speaker, the Irish Times reminds us that “Listening to songs in languages you don’t know is one of the deep pleasures of music” – and you’re missing out on a whole world, and voices from your very own country, if you’re not.

Here’s hoping 2026 is as special musically as this one has been – with its deep sadnesses, and deep pleasures in painful, glorious interplay.

And here’s to brighter times please, we all need it.

I know I do.