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 just below 4 hazy minutes.
Faster and extra streamlined than most of Dalt’s music, the track glides atop rolling percussion and lithe electrical bass, glinting with a sinister, erotic edge. (The track’s velvety ambiance and roadhouse cool are the very image of what we sometimes imply once 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 pictures: a black puma, a speedometer within the pink, “eyes of silver and salt.”
All of it involves a head two-thirds of the best way by way of, with a rooster’s cry and the crunch of steel. In swaggers David Sylvian—veteran British singer-songwriter, with a peerlessly dramatic baritone—taking part in the leather-clad antihero, a imaginative and prescient of mud and pace. “My physique’s smeared in bloody pink,” he drawls, his voice cracked as an armadillo’s conceal: “She mentioned she cherished me/However I don’t belief her but.” In just some skeletal strains, our grizzled street warrior brings Dalt’s heat-mirage visions into sharp focus, rhyming “removed from clear” with “dopamine,” earlier than making a stunning 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 stunning twist into an already singular love track. There, on the collision of what Dalt dreamily describes as “vile luck” and “complete adoration,” explodes a cinematic world in dazzling desert hues.