Along with being one among avant-pop’s trickiest shape-shifters—cosplaying mythological beasts, channeling spirit voices, commingling bolero with science fiction—Lucrecia Dalt has constructed up a pleasant little sideline in soundtrack work, specializing in off–kilter horror. The Colombian musician’s moonlighting gig bleeds into her new single “cosa rara”: Her first solo materials since 2022’s ¡Ay!, it performs out like a movie compressed into slightly below 4 hazy minutes.
Faster and extra streamlined than most of Dalt’s music, the music glides atop rolling percussion and lithe electrical bass, glinting with a sinister, erotic edge. (The music’s velvety environment and roadhouse cool are the very image of what we sometimes imply after we invoke the time period “Lynchian.”) She sings in Spanish, her ethereal whisper sketching the windswept scene of a desert romance, probably doomed, in stark, indelible photos: a black puma, a speedometer within the purple, “eyes of silver and salt.”
All of it involves a head two-thirds of the way in which by way of, with a rooster’s cry and the crunch of metallic. In swaggers David Sylvian—veteran British singer-songwriter, with a peerlessly dramatic baritone—enjoying the leather-clad antihero, a imaginative and prescient of mud and pace. “My physique’s smeared in bloody purple,” he drawls, his voice cracked as an armadillo’s cover: “She mentioned she liked me/However I don’t belief her but.” In only a few skeletal strains, our grizzled highway warrior brings Dalt’s heat-mirage visions into sharp focus, rhyming “removed from clear” with “dopamine,” earlier than making a shocking confession: “The partitions are skinny, my nerves are shot/I’m weak and I do know it/Is that door locked?” The sudden admission of weak point throws a shocking twist into an already singular love music. There, on the collision of what Dalt dreamily describes as “vile luck” and “whole adoration,” explodes a cinematic world in dazzling desert hues.