Lucrecia Dalt

Very few vocalists during the last decade have challenged conceptions of song, style, and sound as much as Lucrecia Dalt. Born in Colombia, she emerged in Europe under her first name only after the start of the millennium, making stylish and smart synth-pop. But Dalt gradually ratcheted up the strangeness of her sounds, building increasingly ornate uncanny valleys of electronic hiss and digital manipulation, ASMR vocals and warped balladry. Her first two albums for the excellent RVNG label, 2018’s Anticlines and 2020’s No Era Sólida, were audacious advances. The former geotechnical engineer seemed to take her fascination with geologic time and sedimentation and apply it to sound, so there was a surprise lurking within every new layer.

But during the pandemic, Dalt turned to the idioms of her childhood, including salsa and merengue, to build ¡Ay!, a conceptually rich and musically welcoming album about an alien encountering earthbound phenomena for the first time. It was a breakthrough, allowing her to apply the experimental techniques she’d sharpened to regional forms wrongly seen as static. That work continues on 2025’s A Danger to Ourselves, where collaborations with the likes of David Sylvian, Juana Molina, and steadfast collaborator Alex Lázaro create a half-haunted house, half-dance club full of erotic possibility and lurking menace. Dalt is a daring composer, unafraid of daunting ideas; her music still finds a way to feel compulsive and human.