Danny L Harle releases his new single ‘Raft In The Sea’, featuring acclaimed songwriter and vocalist Julia Michaels. The track is the latest to be unveiled from Harle’s highly-anticipated debut album Cerulean, due for release on 13th February 2026.
An emotionally exposed centrepiece of Cerulean, ‘Raft In The Sea’ finds Harle stripping back his trademark maximalism to reveal a song of quiet devastation and fragile, euphoric beauty. Built on swelling synths, slow-burning harmonies and a sense of open space, the track foregrounds Michaels’ vocal in its most raw and melancholy form – drifting between intimacy and enormity, solitude and surrender.
Speaking about the collaboration, Harle says:
“I was incredibly honoured to work with Julia – she does not need to do anything for anyone. I initially met her during a Dua Lipa session, and my jaw literally dropped when I heard her sing this idea in the room. I heard something in her voice that I’d not heard in her own music. In a similar way to working with MNEK, I wanted to bring out the rawness and melancholy of her voice. When we were making this song, I asked her, ‘Can you just be sad?’ And she said, ‘For you Danny, I will.’” Her performance is just incredible.”
The song exemplifies Harle’s desire on Cerulean to seek out emotional truth and unfamiliar colours in voices we think we know – a theme that runs throughout the album’s 13 tracks. Cerulean marks Harle’s first full-length release on XL Recordings and his most definitive artistic statement to date. Following 2021’s immersive Harlecore project, Harle considers Cerulean his true debut. “This is my debut album,” he says. “It really is the big one.”
A voyage into vast, alien sonic landscapes, Cerulean fuses speaker-blowing bass and euphoric trance synths with classical harmonies, tactile sound design and Harle’s own field recordings of waves lapping against the shore. Inspired by Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, the record exists “on the threshold between dreams and reality,” capturing what Harle describes as a pursuit of melancholic euphoria – megalophobic in scale yet deeply human at its core.
Seeking “the best melodies sung by the best voices,” Harle enlisted an exceptional cast of collaborators, including Caroline Polachek, Clairo, Julia Michaels, PinkPantheress, Oklou and MNEK, alongside newer voices like kacha, and even his own daughters. Across 13 tracks, Cerulean balances dancefloor power with emotional resonance to brilliant effect. Meanwhile, Harle’s wide-ranging influences – from hedonistic rave to the haunting Dark Souls video game series, Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, and Renaissance and Elizabethan composers like Monteverdi, Thomas Tallis, and William Byrd – underpin the album’s dazzling, genre (and centuries)-spanning focus.
Born in North London, Harle’s early exposure to avant-garde concerts and chart pop shaped his singular musical lens. Emerging from the visionary PC Music collective with 2013’s ‘Broken Flowers,’ he became one of pop’s most adventurous producers, collaborating with the likes of Charli XCX, Carly Rae Jepsen, Oklou, FKA twigs, Florence and The Machine, Shygirl, Dua Lipa, and co-executive producing Caroline Polachek’s acclaimed Pang, and subsequently earning a GRAMMY nomination for his work on ‘Desire, I Want to Turn Into You.’
Pre-order / pre-save Cerulean here.
Stream / download ‘Raft in the Sea’ here.
