With Cerulean, Danny L Harle is in a sense inviting you to consider the difference between a first album and a debut album. Harlecore, the PC Music alum’s actual first LP, was a head-spinning foray into the extremes of rave music, framed as an interactive club experience featuring distinct rooms and mystery guests. There’s nothing mysterious about the guests on Cerulean, Harle’s supposed debut album, which stars major pop stars he’s previously worked with, like Dua Lipa and Caroline Polachek, as well as PinkPantheress and Clairo. The setting is apocalyptic and oceanic, but certainly not as confined as that of Harlecore; in a festival context, I can imagine it translating to a dazzling post-headliner set as opposed to a festival-closing rave meant to dance you through the exhaustion, which is how I remember his Primavera Sound 2022 and 2025 gigs. Rather than bouncing between different forms of intensity, Cerulean dives into a more liminal soundworld pitched at, but never fully occupying, “the threshold between dreams and reality.” Though its cinematic scale is wondrous, Harle is often too busy fitting the pieces together to grant them meaning.
1. Noctilucence
Noctilucence is bioluminescence after dark, which makes me want to queue up Ichiko Aoba’s Luminescent Creatures. Beyond the ocean as a muse, both albums trade in lush orchestral arrangements, though this opening track clearly suggests all kinds of rave music are about to take over Cerulean.
2. Starlight [feat. PinkPantheress]
When recording ‘Starlight’, PinkPantheress may not have been aware that she was guesting on an album beginning with a track called ‘Noctiulence’, but it’s clear she’s entirely uninterested in capturing the enchanting power of another kind of light. She makes ‘Starlight’ all about human dynamics, its titular radiance something to be avoided at all costs. “I’ve met someone like you, they don’t love me back,” she laments, her performance so convincing in its kineticism it encourages Harle to get even flashier with his production, pushing what could be a pretty tame dance song into hardcore territory. It’s too bright not to be infectious.
3. Azimuth [feat. Caroline Polachek]
There’s no elaborate mythology around Cerulean for listeners to latch onto, yet Caroline Polachek seems to have lived inside it for all eternity. The only singer with two guest features on the album, her dedication doesn’t go unnoticed; her dramatically mesmerizing voice is a force to be reckoned with as it yearns to be alone, not with a lover so much as nature itself: “I ask the rain, how did we get here?/ How did we fall so far from home?”
4. Facing Away [feat. Clairo]
The fact that ‘Facing Away’ is only a little over a minute long feels like a crime; this could have been an absolute highlight, proof that Harle is capable of giving space to a beautiful voice more understatedly vulnerable than, say, that of PinkPantheress. I’d never skip ‘Facing Away’, but I always want it to last a little longer: Clairo sings of being left to swim ashore over simple bass; instead of peppering it with field recordings, Harle lets us use our imagination before tastefully introducing strings. In the absence of a hook, and in line with the protagonist’s lack of direction, cutting the song short might have been conceptually the right choice. It’s still a shame.
5. Raft in the Sea
Harle seems to have cannily sequenced the collaborations in order of preference, but ‘Raft in the Sea’ has more than just a sweet (and memeable) hook in “Oh, I.” Even on a glossier track, Julia Michaels succeeds in matching the emotional fragility of previous guests when she sings, “How could I’ve known that every step I helped you take was away from me?” Harle’s subsequent flourishes are gentle, wafts of saxophone and whistling over “my everything,” the same everything whose ghost is now softly guiding her to sleep.
6. Island (da da da)
If you have a soft spot for accordion-featuring Eurodance of the late aughts, ‘Island (da da da)’ might be for you. But especially following the melancholy of ‘Raft in the Sea’, and even with a solid vocal from Harle’s own daughter, it feels all too cartoonish, sucking any kind of depth the project has been building towards.
7. Te Re Re [feat. kacha]
‘(da da da)’ not enough for you? Take ‘Te Re Re’, a track that infuses its predecessor’s trance influence with Cerulean’s ethereal atmosphere, which kacha effectively sells.
8. Laa
A flavorful Eurodance excursion, melding elements from every track before it, makes sense as practically Cerulean’s centerpiece, reminding us that this debut album is a showcase of Harle’s skills as a producer more than a talented curator. It’s still more than thrice as long as ‘Facing Away’, though, which is hard to justify.
9. O Now Am I Truly Lost
After the playful energy of ‘Laa’, ‘O Now I Am Truly Lost’ relocates the album’s emotional core while serving as a bridge to the high-profile collaborations on its back end. Harle’s youngest daughter (it’s his eldest on ‘Island’) makes a cameo, offering an apt review: “It’s music!”
10. Two Hearts [feat. Dua Lipa]
In my estimation, the collaborations on the back half are ordered in ascending quality. Not only does ‘Two Hearts’ push Dua Lipa past her vocal comfort zone, it also stretches itself to its musical limits with a third act bouncing between a quiet bridge and an electro climax. “Broken in the dark, we found another,” Lipa sings, her conviction believable – but without breathing life to the darkness, the stakes feel forced.
11. Crystallize My Tears [feat. oklou and MNEK]
‘Crystallize My Tears’ recycles some lyrical ideas from the previous song (“Is there a love that I can give a deeper meaning” becomes “Give meaning to my sadness”), and it lacks stylistic focus. But there’s a refreshing vocal dynamic between oklou and MNEK, whose manipulated voices both take on strangely assertive and mysterious qualities, mirroring the ineffable power the lovers hold over each other. The melancholy never crystallizes, so neither does the song.
12. On & On [feat. Caroline Polachek]
Not as strong as ‘Azimuth’, ‘On and On’ is indicative of Cerulean’s progression from ambitious sonic voyage to more of an argument, culminating in: Why can’t the artful pop sensibilities we associate with someone like Caroline Polachek coexist with those of, say, Eiffel 65? It’s not necessarily a bad argument, but the more committed Cerulean seems to it, the more of its soul falls by the wayside. ‘On & On’ is supposed to be a clear continuation of ‘Azimuth’, offering narrative completion – “a piece of peace,” as she puts it – but it’s easy to dismiss.
13. Teardrop in the Ocean
As an IMAX-sized instrumental conclusion to the album, ‘Teardrops in the Ocean’ might serve to plant the idea in your head of Danny L Harle as the next Oneohtrix Point Never, though musically he’s done this sort of thing before with a genuinely entrancing Harlecore track, ‘Ocean’s Theme’. Unlike that album, Cerulean sounds like it’s meant to be projected on a big screen rather than simulating an alternate reality. Indeed, it’s accompanied by a 32-minute audiovisual film, which premiered exclusively via NTS and foregrounds the influence of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker and Ridley Scott’s Alien. Despite featuring all its songs, it’s 10 minutes shorter than the album, which would have benefited from that kind of seamlessness.
