Whoo-hoo! ROSALÍA accepts her Ivors honor with grace, power, and full LUX-era brilliance.
Whoo-hoo! ROSALÍA accepted the International Songwriter of the Year award at The Ivors 2026 with Amazon Music, and the moment felt exactly as major as it should.
ROSALÍA turns an Ivors stage into a reminder that pop can still be sacred, strange, multilingual, and completely ahead of its time.
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Presented by the one and only Damon Albarn himself, the honor placed ROSALÍA exactly where her work has been living for years now: in that rare space where experimentation, emotion, tradition, and futurism all sit at the same table and somehow start singing in harmony.
In her speech, ROSALÍA first gave the room a little honesty and charm, joking about reading her remarks instead of improvising in English. But once she began, the moment shifted from award-show thank-you to full artist statement.
She spoke about creating LUX because she looked around and felt the world was missing tenderness. That alone says everything about why the record lands the way it does: not as a standard pop rollout, but as a searching, devotional, multilingual world built from need, fear, study, and light.
ROSALÍA also opened up about how terrifying it felt to begin a fourth album, describing a writing process that took three years and began from a place of stillness. Instead of rushing to feed the music-industry machine, she allowed herself time — even while knowing how easily artists can be erased when they stop constantly feeding the beast.
That is what made the speech feel bigger than a trophy moment. She acknowledged her own privilege, the privilege of studying music, and the reality that so many brilliant writers may never be recognized because they do not come from stable, visible, or institutionally protected paths. The message was clear: talent is everywhere, but recognition is not handed out equally.
She also used the stage to celebrate the artists who keep motivating her, pointing toward a wider creative universe beyond the most obvious industry roads. In true ROSALÍA fashion, the speech became a call for other paths, other voices, other ways of building a future without shrinking the art to fit the system.
And then came the most moving turn: light. ROSALÍA spoke about songwriting as a lifelong job and as her own way to speak about light — the kind found in human exchanges, in being loved, in food made by family, in dancing like nobody is watching, in someone offering a hand when you badly need it.
That is the center of LUX. Not spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Not ambition emptied of feeling. But light as craft. Light as gratitude. Light as survival. Light as a song that can still reach someone when the world feels too heavy to hold.
The album’s reach is part of what makes this award feel so correct. LUX moves across languages, textures, sacred drama, and wild pop architecture without flattening any of it. It is deeply ROSALÍA: devotional, risky, technical, emotional, and still able to hit like a transmission from tomorrow.
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And because this is The Ivors — an awards space built around the craft of songwriting and composition — the win lands with extra weight. This was not just another shiny industry moment. It was a songwriter being recognized by a songwriting institution for pushing the form somewhere bigger, stranger, and more global.
Bravo-bravissima, ROSALÍA. Bien hecho!
ROSALÍA accepts International Songwriter of the Year at The Ivors 2026.
Dig out her full speech below, where ROSALÍA reflects on the road to LUX, the responsibility of creating, and the kind of artistry that refuses to shrink itself for easy translation.
Watch ROSALÍA’s full International Songwriter of the Year speech.
The full clip captures ROSALÍA accepting one of the night’s major honors at The Ivors 2026, with the speech offering a powerful look at the artist, songwriter, and world-builder behind LUX.
Sources: Award details via The Ivors Academy and Reuters; speech video via The Ivors Academy / YouTube.
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