In addition to being one of avant-pop’s trickiest shape-shifters—cosplaying mythological beasts, channeling spirit voices, commingling bolero with science fiction—Lucrecia Dalt has built up a nice 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 material since 2022’s ¡Ay!, it plays out like a film compressed into just under four hazy minutes.
Quicker and more streamlined than most of Dalt’s music, the song glides atop rolling percussion and lithe electric bass, glinting with a sinister, erotic edge. (The song’s velvety atmosphere and roadhouse cool are the very picture of what we typically mean when we invoke the term “Lynchian.”) She sings in Spanish, her airy whisper sketching the windswept scene of a desert romance, possibly doomed, in stark, indelible images: a black puma, a speedometer in the red, “eyes of silver and salt.”
It all comes to a head two-thirds of the way through, with a rooster’s cry and the crunch of metal. In swaggers David Sylvian—veteran British singer-songwriter, with a peerlessly dramatic baritone—playing the leather-clad antihero, a vision of dust and speed. “My body’s smeared in bloody red,” he drawls, his voice cracked as an armadillo’s hide: “She said she loved me/But I don’t trust her yet.” In just a few skeletal lines, our grizzled road warrior brings Dalt’s heat-mirage visions into sharp focus, rhyming “far from clean” with “dopamine,” before making a surprising confession: “The walls are thin, my nerves are shot/I’m vulnerable and I know it/Is that door locked?” The sudden admission of weakness throws a surprising twist into an already singular love song. There, at the collision of what Dalt dreamily describes as “vile luck” and “total adoration,” explodes a cinematic world in dazzling desert hues.
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