Music That Has Shaken The World Lately: October Edition

Releases of the Month

PinkPantheress

2025 is the year the world became obsessed with PinkPantheress and rightfully so. Her music sounds both nostalgic and futuristic at the same time: a pop that blends drum & bass, UK garage, and bedroom pop, with a personality as captivating as her music.

This month, she released a remix version of her album Fancy That? called Fancy Some More?, featuring special guests such as Anitta, Zara Larsson, JADE, Oklou, and Kylie Minogue, just to name a few.

ROSALÍA

ROSALÍA teased her upcoming album Lux with her new single Berghain, going in an unexpected sonic direction, completely different from her previous album (the acclaimed MOTOMAMI and its predecessors), yet still being praised by her fans and new audiences, and performing well on the charts.

Featuring the London Symphony Orchestra, the song opens with rapid violins and ROSALÍA’s lyrical vocals singing in German. Considered by many as her most ambitious work so far, the track is a blend of symphonic drama and experimental club energy that made me want to see her scoring a film.

Lux will be a classical album with pop elements. In the words of ROSALÍA herself, it is a more complex album that invites listeners to focus and go in depth, inspired by the feminine mystique, very spiritual, and almost entirely made with acoustic instruments.

As someone whose favourite artists are always the versatile ones who push boundaries and keep challenging themselves and their fans’ expectations, as ROSALÍA has proven to do, I am extremely excited about the album and how it will be received.

It also made me reflect again about the future of art in times of AI, and I believe this is just the beginning of statements like hers: complex bodies of work and concepts filled with surprise elements and contrasts. Not only are artists experimenting with different genres, especially non-mainstream ones such as classical (or salsa, in the case of Bad Bunny, for example), but we’re also seeing more elaborate songs that evolve and turn into something completely unexpected.

Of course, this has always happened, but we’re now witnessing it on another level. Not to mention live experiences that will become both more intimate and more grandiose, immersing the audience in the artist’s world and might be the last truly “real” experience in a hyper-digital era: a place where emotion, imperfection, and collective energy can’t be replicated by AI.

Concerts might become multi-sensory narratives: part show, part theatre, part digital dream. Technology will allow artists to design spaces that respond in real time to music and emotion: lighting that follows and evolves according to a vocal line, beat and chord progression, perhaps scents and temperature shifts that mirror a song’s energy.

But while production scales are growing, audiences also crave real connection and we are already seeing a rise in smaller, more immersive experiences: limited-capacity shows, secret performances, or hybrid formats where fans can feel like they’re inside the artist’s process rather than merely watching from the outside, such as the audience improvising with Jacob Collier or seeing Lady Gaga on the Mayhem Ball playing in arenas, but having intimate moments of true connection and conversation with her fans, bringing them close and singing the last song backstage in her dressing room while she removes the makeup and greets her dancers, captured by her concert director/cinematographer.

At the same time, arena and festival shows will become more cinematic universes of their own. Artists will continue to build worlds with conceptual stages, narrative arcs, live visual art that turn a concert into a journey. What’s exciting is that both extremes can coexist: the intimate, almost spiritual moments, and the grand, larger-than-life spectacles that also feel spiritual for its magnitude.

Artists like ROSALÍA remind us that the essence of creation is not only about technical skill or production innovation which she has shown over and over again that she masters it, but in emotional depth, intention and the imperfections that make something feel alive and more importantly, makes us all feel alive.

As we’re entering an era where two artistic forces will coexist: the hyper-digital and the deeply human, on one side AI will enable new sonic possibilities, expanding access and experimentation in ways we’ve never seen and imagined. On the other, artists will respond accordingly, with raw emotion, handcrafted production and more conceptual depth: at times, with art that feels deeply human, tangible, vulnerable and at times with a magnitude that feels out of this world and spiritual.

Maybe that’s why projects like Lux feel so relevant. They’re not just albums, but manifestos about presence, time, life and humanity. In a world where AI can mimic almost everything, originality might no longer be only about creating something new, but about expressing something real in unexpected ways that prompts would not be able to reproduce and artificial intelligence would never be able to anticipate.

To hear ROSALÍA’S new single and many more great releases made by real artists, here’s my October favourite playlist here: