Written by: Athena Kalaganis

Edited by: Abigail George

Rosalia’s fourth studio album, LUX, breaks boundaries in a time when generative artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly beginning its intrusion into creative spaces. Deezer, a French music streaming platform, estimates 60,000 fully AI-generated songs make their way to the platform on a daily basis, which will amount to 21 million annually. With the incoming artificial traffic, artists are at risk, as algorithms are being programmed to stream music made by generative AI en masse. A love letter to the world around her and to the (real) women that came before her, LUX pushes back against an industry that is appropriating the human voice.

With LUX, Rosalia decentralizes herself from the equation, putting humanity at the forefront of her genre-defying record, blending her flamenco roots with the operatic oratorio. The chorus of Porcelana, the fourth track, repeats two Latin phrases: “Ego sum nihil/Ego sum lux mundi.” Roughly translating to “I am nothing/I am the light of the world,” these lines cement the throughline of her November 2025 release. LUX is a testament to the innate humanity of art. Within its 15 tracks and three bonus songs, the Spanish artist sings in 13 different languages. She draws inspiration from feminist authors and dedicates every track to a female saint, ranging from eighth-century Sufi mystic Rabia al-Adawiyya in La Yugular to twelfth-century Santa Rosalía de Palermo in Focu ‘Ranni. 

Speaking With the World 

Rosalía uses language as a means to detach individualism from the music-making process, in turn connecting with the world around her. The album features several tracks with collaborating artists accompanying Rosalía singing in their tongues, such as Memoria, a traditional Portuguese fado song featuring Carminho. Singing in 13 languages, 11 of which are not her mother tongue, presented a creative process which demanded the collaboration of native speakers, translators, and teachers. While Google Translate was used as a starting point, these communications with experts allowed her to understand how these foreign languages work. She recognized that direct word-to-word translations could never adequately reflect the intent of her lyrics. Deep research was necessary to ensure logical phonetic and rhyming schemes for each language. 

This interaction-based research is slowly becoming exceptional. Mikey Shulman, CEO and co-founder of Suno, a generative AI music company valued at 2.45 billion dollars, sees the future of music as a digital interaction. Thus, for those heavily invested in this damaging industry, the social collaboration central to LUX would ideally be a process of the past, rendering music effectively soulless. Outside the music industry, Adrien Brody won the Oscar for Best Actor in The Brutalist where he portrayed a Hungarian character, yet AI was used to “refine” his pronunciation of dialogue in Hungarian. Comparatively, the imperfections of Rosalía’s pronunciations remain in the record. LUX, in its ambitious linguistic diversity, establishes itself not as a pretentious work but a pastiche of rigorous collaboration, unafraid to allow imperfections to seep through. 

When asked why she chose to engage with all these languages, Rosalia’s answer was simple: why not? She refuses to blind herself to the world around her. Recalling the lyrics in Porcelana and highlighting the third verse of La Yugular, where she says “Yo quepo en el mundo y el mundo cabe en mí – I fit in the world, and the world fits in me,” Rosalía sees not the world as belonging to her, but as a being belonging to the world. Interacting with different languages, their complexities in terms of rhyming schemes and sentence structure, and experts demonstrate her openness to and care for the world surrounding her.

The Divine Feminine

While language connects the listener to the present, her representation of historical female figures connects Rosalía and the listener to the women of the past. Feminine mysticism represents the main thematic inspiration behind the album, and her personal religiosity is placed front and center with the cover art featuring the artist draped in nun-garb. However, particular emphasis is added on identifying connections and diversions between the mystical experiences of sainthood across the centuries and around the world. The record is essentially the culmination of two years of research on hagiographies and feminist theory. Theology is only instrumental to LUX as an intrinsic testament to women’s history, from the Buddhist nun Vimala to a patron saint of France, Joan of Arc. 

Drawing on French philosopher Simone Veil’s idea that love derives from adoring the distance separating one from what is loved, the Spanish singer cites “love and curiosity – wanting to understand better the other” as her motivations for taking on the arduous task. Rosalía’s research allowed her to situate herself within the journeys of these historical women. For instance, Reliquia, the album’s second track, reflects the global trajectory fame has brought upon her, where she leaves a little piece of herself behind in every city she frequents. She effectively becomes a relic for the world. The track takes inspiration from Santa Rosa de Lima, whose relics are scattered across the world. 

In contrast, while LUX connects with the divine feminine in a deeply appreciative manner, generative AI completely appropriates the human voice in a concerning trend focused on imitating Black women. Xania Monet, generated with Suno, was the first AI-generated ‘artist’ to officially debut on a Billboard radio chart on November 11th, 2025, four days following LUX’s release, and was even accorded a multimillion-dollar deal following a bidding war between record labels. Similarly, Sienna Rose, an AI-generated artist producing soulless soul songs, generates around £2,000 in royalties a week and millions of Spotify streams. Both these creations gain traction by appropriating the sound and culture of Black women, disconnecting their humanity from the music industry. Comparing the rigorous intellectual efforts of Rosalia with the likes of Xania Monet and Sienna Rose underlines their inhumanity, pushing them to copy the styles of contemporary artists. 

Respecting Historicity 

To fully grasp the album, one must look into translations of lyrics and historical references. She recognizes that she asks a lot of her audience with the album and insists it acts as an “antidote” to artists gearing their music for viral TikTok trends. Where Lux seeks to understand and appreciate, AI seeks to denigrate. For instance, an AI-Generated cover of Stromae’s classic Papaoutai was the highest new entry on the January Global Spotify Charts. This incursion of generative AI is particularly appalling as Stromae’s original represents him growing up without and missing his father, who was murdered in the Rwandan genocide. Rosalía dedicates herself to the appreciation of the historical context of her art. 

Across this space-time continuum, Rosalia interacts with humanity in ways that can never be achieved through artificial intelligence. She makes a point of highlighting that her album is fully human-made. On being able to pull off the linguistic variety of Lux, she says, “It’s all human – very much human,” denying any use of generative artificial intelligence. This answer appears as both a relief, that this is an entirely human production executed so well, and an unsettling concern, where an artist has to deny using generative AI when their work presents at a certain level of complexity.