Out now: Danny L Harle – Cerulean

GRAMMY-nominated musician, producer and composer Danny L Harle today releases Cerulean, his highly-anticipated debut album. 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.

To celebrate the album’s release, Harle shared ‘Two Hearts’, his equally-anticipated collaboration with Dua Lipa, which premiered as Radio 1’s Hottest Record. Continuing a creative partnership that was born during sessions for Dua Lipa’s acclaimed 2024 Radical Optimism album, ‘Two Hearts’ is an arena-ready highlight and follows weeks of speculation after Dua Lipa was recently revealed as the final Cerulean collaborator.

In anticipation of the Cerulean’s release, Harle also released a 32 minute audiovisual film to accompany the album. Directed by acclaimed filmmaker Lilian Hardouineau, the film unfolds as a live performance set inside a vast, apocalyptic maritime world. Premiering exclusively via NTS, Cerulean features every song from the album, reimagined as a continuous performance moving between moments of euphoria, melancholy, and playful surrealism. Hardouineau’s visual language draws on sci-fi and cinematic touchstones including Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Ridley Scott’s Alien, creating a dreamlike world that feels both monumental and haunted. Much of the film was shot on the Bull Sand Fort, an abandoned sea fort in the Humber estuary, with the location lending the film its uncanny scale and sense of isolation – a decaying structure surrounded by water, suspended between ruin and reverie. Watch it here.

“The tension between euphoria and melancholy really guided the project,” says Hardouineau. “We imagined the DJ set almost like the last one before the end of the world – moments of despair followed by bursts of vitality, as if Danny were fighting the apocalypse with music.”

Stream / download Cerulean here.