Lucrecia Dalt - A Danger to Ourselves (RVNG INTL.) [Alternative Pop]

The Slow Music Movement
Sep 20
2 min read

*** This blog post first appeared in TSMM's September 18th Newsletter, where you can get all the tips (and more) first ***

The cover for Lucrecia Dalt's, A Danger to Ourselves album, showing her with black hair covering their face grins intensely in a black-and-white image. Text reads, "a danger to ourselves."

It’s an old cliche, but never a truer word said, that it takes ten years of hard work to become an overnight success, and many of today’s self entitled bedroom producers who just bought their first synth and bootlegged a couple of sample packs, should consider this and get their heads down for a decade before they start moaning that Spotify is not giving them a living after two singles and a poorly received first EP.

I first came across Lucrecia Dalt when she played a gig at a book shop/gallery/cultural centre in Barcelona’s Raval district when we both lived in the city about fifteen years ago. I remember being so impressed with her live looping and electronic guitarscapes that I went to tell her so after the gig; her talent and potential was obvious.

Black-and-white portrait of Lucrecia Dalt with shoulder length hair in a dark outfit. She gazes softly, with shadows cast on the wall. Text reads "divina."

Like so many artists she soon realised that Barcelona’s big festival induced musical aura was a mirage, and local gigs wouldn’t pay the rent, especially with the city’s civismo laws closing so many venues at the time; not that any of them ever paid more than €50 anyway. So off to Berlin she went; an altogether more receptive and better paying home for her undoubted talents, and one that not only opened doors but seemed to encourage an experimental phase, which I can’t lie estranged us for a bit. Well, it sounds like she’s got the noise out of her system and she’s only gone, albeit with co-production help from David Sylvian no less and vocal assistance from Camille Mandoki and Juana Molina, made one of this year’s best experimental pop albums for RVNG Intl.

Dalt never shied from using her voice, either sung or spoken, but she’s really giving her vocal chords a workout this time round, musing on the “unfiltered complexities of human connection” in both Spanish and English and with real depth too. I think there’s a lot more acoustic instrumentation than the electronic processing lets on, but her electronic bent leads the way throughout. Don’t expect any toe tappers or sing alongs, she’s putting the alternative into alt-pop, although there’s some intriguing flashbacks to swampy Americana, vintage Latin song craft, orchestral soundtracks, industrial clang and distorted trip hop nestled amongst her trademark experimental electronic constructs.

The album is an obvious labour of love, doesn’t sound like too much else, and effortlessly balances Dalt’s stubborn experimentalism with a more accessible pop sheen, but ultimately it’s a triumph for perseverance and time honing her studio and song craft without compromising her singular artistic vision. Larger venues and bigger pay cheques await, and she sure as hell deserves them.