On July 7, 2025, Lucrecia Dalt’s coronary heart stopped. She had suffered a extreme epileptic seizure, and eight seconds would move earlier than it resumed beating. The following day, the Colombian musician launched “caes,” the third single from her breathtaking new album A Hazard to Ourselves—a tune that implies, she says, “that the elegant will be reached by way of surrendering to the act of falling.” For 2 days after her near-death expertise, she soared, so overwhelmed by the great thing about her environment that she puzzled if she had truly died and was experiencing the afterlife. She hadn’t, in fact, and the world that wowed her was the identical one she occupied earlier than her coronary heart had stopped. She had simply surrendered to the autumn.
“Caes,” a gorgeously harmonic duet with Amor Muere’s Camille Mandoki, attracts inspiration from the Cuban-American artist Ana Mendieta and the mannequin Evelyn McHale, two ladies whose deadly falls stay intertwined with the artworks linked to them. McHale’s closing {photograph}, “The Most Lovely Suicide,” was taken by Robert Wiles and repurposed by Andy Warhol, whereas Mendieta’s haunting multimedia collection Siluetas presaged her tragic finish. Dalt’s tumble was decidedly extra metaphorical; after years on the highway, juggling a number of initiatives whereas touring the world, she moved to New Mexico and fell in love.
The trail of Lucrecia Dalt’s profession over the previous 20 years has been serpentine, rising from electronic-tinged synth pop into varied sonic abstractions, embodying beasts, spirits, and the earth itself earlier than reimagining the boleros of her youth by way of the lens of science fiction. Every experiment felt distinct, but all of them shared the same detachment; constructing her information round fantastical characters and surrealistic ideas, she maintained a semblance of distance between her artwork and her private life. Her newest work obliterates that hole.
Most of A Hazard to Ourselves was written and recorded in New Mexico on the dwelling studio of her companion, David Sylvian, the veteran British art-rocker, and its content material captures the extreme change of latest love. Dalt says the document emerged after “spending sufficient time within the abyssal realm of erotic delirium.” This time, relatively than invoking legendary creatures, she says, “the lyrics operate as declarations, or odes, and essentially the most private truths I’ve explored up to now are discovered inside these strains.” It’s essentially the most uncovered she’s ever been on document.
The album opens with their duet “cosa rara,” a deceptively buoyant investigation of lust constructed upon dynamic drum loops from Alex Lázaro, who additionally gave ¡Ay! its rhythmic spine, that shrink and broaden, constructing and releasing rigidity. The brand new lovers swirl round each other amid breathy harmonies, scattered flexatone, and the screech of Sylvian’s guitar. Enveloped by their very own need, they succumb to it, their minds and our bodies disassembled and rearranged. The climax is a automobile crash; Sylvian’s gravelly baritone narrates the ultimate, refractory verse with post-coital readability, the bliss of give up tempered by unease.
