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. 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 Dua Lipa, Caroline Polachek, Clairo, PinkPantheress, Oklou, MNEK, Julia Michaels, and kacha, alongside contributions from his own daughters. These performances sit within a musical world shaped by influences ranging from hedonistic rave culture and the Dark Souls video game series to Philip Glass’s Einstein on the Beach and Renaissance and Elizabethan composers including Monteverdi, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, themes Harle explored in a recent New York Times profile.
To celebrate the album’s release, last night 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. It follows the success of Cerulean singles ‘Raft In The Sea (feat Julia Michaels)’, ‘Starlight (feat. PinkPantheress),’ ‘Azimuth (feat. Caroline Polachek),’ and ‘Crystallise My Tears (feat. Oklou & MNEK)’
Danny L Harle – ‘Starlight (ft. PinkPantheress)’
Last night, 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.
“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.”
Danny L Harle – ‘Azimuth (feat. Caroline Polachek)’
WATCH THE CERUEAN FILM VIA NTS RADIO HERE
DANNY L HARLE
CERULEAN
13TH FEBRUARY 2026
XL RECORDINGS
Tracklisting
- Noctilucence
- Starlight (feat. PinkPantheress)
- Azimuth (feat. Caroline Polachek)
- Facing Away (feat. Clairo)
- Raft In The Sea (feat. Julia Michaels)
- Island (da da da)
- Te Re Re (feat. kacha)
- Laa
- O Now Am I Truly Lost
- Two Hearts
- Crystallise My Tears (feat. Oklou and MNEK)
- On & On (feat. Caroline Polachek)
- Teardrop in the Ocean
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