On July 7, 2025, Lucrecia Dalt’s heart stopped. She had suffered a severe epileptic seizure, and eight seconds would pass before it resumed beating. The next day, the Colombian musician released “caes,” the third single from her breathtaking new album A Danger to Ourselves—a song that suggests, she says, “that the sublime can be reached through surrendering to the act of falling.” For two days after her near-death experience, she soared, so overwhelmed by the beauty of her surroundings that she wondered if she had actually died and was experiencing the afterlife. She hadn’t, of course, and the world that wowed her was the same one she occupied before her heart had stopped. She had just surrendered to the fall.
“Caes,” a gorgeously harmonic duet with Amor Muere’s Camille Mandoki, draws inspiration from the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and the model Evelyn McHale, two women whose fatal falls remain intertwined with the artworks connected to them. McHale’s final photograph, “The Most Beautiful Suicide,” was taken by Robert Wiles and repurposed by Andy Warhol, while Mendieta’s haunting multimedia series Siluetas presaged her tragic end. Dalt’s tumble was decidedly more metaphorical; after years on the road, juggling multiple projects while touring the world, she moved to New Mexico and fell in love.
The path of Lucrecia Dalt’s career over the past 20 years has been serpentine, growing from electronic-tinged synth pop into various sonic abstractions, embodying beasts, spirits, and the earth itself before reimagining the boleros of her youth through the lens of science fiction. Each experiment felt distinct, yet they all shared a similar detachment; building her records around fantastical characters and surrealistic concepts, she maintained a semblance of distance between her art and her personal life. Her latest work obliterates that gap.
Most of A Danger to Ourselves was written and recorded in New Mexico at the home studio of her partner, David Sylvian, the veteran British art-rocker, and its content captures the intense exchange of new love. Dalt says the record emerged after “spending enough time in the abyssal realm of erotic delirium.” This time, rather than invoking mythical creatures, she says, “the lyrics function as declarations, or odes, and the most personal truths I have explored to date are found within those lines.” It’s the most exposed she’s ever been on record.
The album opens with their duet “cosa rara,” a deceptively buoyant investigation of lust built upon dynamic drum loops from Alex Lázaro, who also gave ¡Ay! its rhythmic backbone, that shrink and expand, building and releasing tension. The new lovers swirl around one another amid breathy harmonies, scattered flexatone, and the screech of Sylvian’s guitar. Enveloped by their own desire, they succumb to it, their minds and bodies disassembled and rearranged. The climax is a car crash; Sylvian’s gravelly baritone narrates the final, refractory verse with post-coital clarity, the bliss of surrender tempered by unease.
Sylvian co-produced the record with Dalt, and his influence is pervasive, if subtle. “The relationship was being born during that time with someone that is also very sensitive to what it is to let yourself go in the sound, in the feeling, and allow it to be,” she told interviewer Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in a public listening event at New York’s Public Records. Parts of the album are of a piece with Sylvian’s ambient albums, such as 2003’s Blemish, with a yearning croon that inhabits the center of a dissonant maelstrom. He helped her refine both details and dynamics as she spent days recording vocal takes with precise intention. It’s his verse on “cosa rara” that gives the album its title: “We are out of favor/A danger to ourselves/It’s not amphetamines, it’s something else.”
Dalt’s voice has always been mesmerizing, but here it’s imbued with unprecedented strength and range as she floats between English and Spanish without friction. On “mala sangre,” she purrs menacingly of an “amorous bloodletting” and “glistening nonsense,” yet she sweetens the folk guitar on “amorcito caradura” with honeyed tones, and channels the breezy romance of Sade on “hasta el final.” Even when the mix is at its most chaotic, as in the disorienting soundstage of “agüita con sal,” her voice exerts a gravitational force that prevents the track from spiraling out of control.
In addition to Sylvian and Mandoki—a close friend who first collaborated with Dalt as a participant in the 2018 Red Bull Music Academy in Berlin—she also features Juana Molina (on “the common reader”), the preternatural Argentinian loop maven whose melodic rhythms have informed Dalt’s records since at least her 2012 record Commutus. But most impressive is Lázaro, a gifted percussionist who helped her construct an album full of melodic rhythms with resonant instruments like the marimba, flexatone, rototom, and even glass bottle. The result is a richly tonal record driven by percussion, with negative space populated by meticulously sculpted abstractions. Flirting with pop, she remains determined to subvert its conventions.
But even “pop” remains a subjective distinction, and a relative one, in an oeuvre that has explored the boundaries of song form and composition. Dalt still wields textures as incorporeal and jarring as ever, and renders familiar tones from piano, strings, and guitar merely ornamental. Engaging with much of her recent work has felt like watching an auteur capture scenes through the lens of a camera, directing her characters and carefully arranging the mise-en-scène. On A Danger to Ourselves she turns the camera on herself and the lens becomes a mirror, revealing an artist even less inhibited than before.
