Lucrecia Dalt, “A Danger To Ourselves” (RVNG Intl., 2025)
I was admittedly a bit blindsided by Dalt’s seemingly effortless transformation into an outsider pop chanteuse on 2022’s excellent ¡Ay! album and I am amusingly blindsided yet again with this follow up, as she has somehow gotten even better at balancing her great hooks and sensuous vocals with her wilder, more experimental leanings. In fact, this is unquestionably her finest batch of songs yet, but that achievement is further enhanced by the efforts of some extremely talented and well-chosen collaborators. Notably, Juana Molina, Nick Leon, and Amor Muere‘s Camille Mandoki all make guest appearances on individual pieces, but it is returning percussionist Alex Lazaro and co-producer David Sylvian who nearly steal the show, as both help elevate Dalt’s bold and singular vision into something truly revelatory with their contributions. This is Dalt’s strongest album by a goddamn landslide.
The album opens with the killer lead single “cosa rara (strange thing),” which provides quite a representative overview of nearly everything that I love about this album (albeit with one small caveat). Like many pieces on the album, it is built from little more than a simmering percussion groove, a bass line, Dalt’s charismatic and seductive vocal performance, and a host of cool psychedelic and dub-inspired effects. The minimal arrangements suit these songs extremely well, as Dalt’s voice is more than enough to carry these pieces melodically and the pared-to-the-bone palette of just drums and voice leaves plenty of open space for Dalt and her collaborators to go wild in the periphery with guitar feedback, saxophone squonks, and trippy electronic flourishes. Aside from that, there is also a clapping breakdown (I’m a sucker for a good handclap rhythm) and a great dubby outro featuring a mesmerizing spoken word performance from Sylvian. While literally every individual element is great, “casa rara” narrowly misses being my favorite song on the album solely because it self-destructs right before Sylvian comes in, which gives it the feel of two excellent pieces mashed together rather than one perfectly crafted masterpiece.
Happily, Dalt and company hit the bullseye perfectly a bit later with the achingly gorgeous “divina (divine),” which beautifully enhances the previous winning formula with finger snaps, a few bright piano chords, some kind of cool rattling/shimmer motif, and great backing vocals that evoke a hypnagogic ‘60s girl group. Elsewhere, “no death no danger” is another banger just on the strength of its clanging industrial groove and breathy half-sung vocals alone, but also detours into blown out mindfuck territory and a melodic passage that would not be out of place on an Amy Winehouse album. I also love “agüita con sal (water with salt),” which is mesmerizing for more production-centric reasons, as its lurching futuristic groove and sax blurts are greatly enhanced by hallucinatory spatial movements. The sultry trip-hop of “acéphale” is yet another mesmerizing highlight, as it sounds like the would-be sensual banger of the summer, but still manages to appeal to my weirdo sensibility with gnarled feedback, orchestral surges, and some beautifully slicing high-hat.
That said, A Danger To Ourselves arguably falls short of perfection because it starts to lull a bit near the end, but this is one of the rare times that I do not care if an album overstays its welcome. For one, the handful of great songs here exceeded my sky-high expectations so decisively that I was left properly gobsmacked, so any further pleasures were just icing the cake. Equally significant is the fact that only one piece (“stelliformia”) failed to grab me in some way, as nearly every song here features at least one extremely cool idea regardless of whether or not that idea managed to make the leap into a great song (the percussion-driven tropical exotica of “mala sangre,” the lurching industrial groove of “caes,” Sylian’s broken-sounding guitar solo in “covenstead blues, etc.). On top of that, Dalt and Syvlian’s incredibly vivid production makes this one hell of a great headphone record, as Lazaro’s unconventional percussion is the ideal raw material for dub-inspired excellence. Given all of that, I feel no hesitation at all in proclaiming A Danger To Ourselves a lock for one of the most essential albums of 2025. Dalt has long been a reliably unique and compelling artist, but she has really been on a tear lately and this album elevates her vision to an entirely new level altogether.
Listen here.
