Danny L Harle has enlisted his longtime studio-mate and co-writer Caroline Polachek for the new song “Azimuth.” Take a listen below, via XL. Harle has also announced a European tour—scroll down for the dates.
Harle says of the new song, “‘Azimuth’ felt like the finalisation of an approach that Caroline and I had been orbiting for some time as a way of putting her voice into my music—I sometimes call it the ‘trance siren.’ You can hear manifestations of it in tracks like ‘Insomnia’ from Pang and ‘On the Beach’ from Death Stranding 2, but this was the first time I managed to translate it into my style of dance music. Azimuth’s melody could only have been sung by Caroline, it is designed around her voice, I couldn’t imagine anyone else singing it or giving a performance like that. It also allowed us to play with scale, space and quietness in a way I’ve never done before. For me, ‘Azimuth’ is a trance ballad, despairing but hopeful, best heard in a in club in a sunken cathedral.”
“Azimuth” is Harle’s follow-up to the PinkPantheress collaboration “Starlight,” released in July. That was his first solo release since his formal solo debut LP, 2021’s Harlecore. Polachek shared her own first post–Desire, I Want to Turn Into You single, “Dang,” in October last year. Since then, she has released “Starburned and Unkissed,” from the I Saw the TV Glow soundtrack, and made an unexpected appearance on the post-rock band Caroline’s album Caroline 2. More recently, she released “On the Beach”—the title track of the video game Death Stranding 2—which was co-produced with Harle and co-written by Death Stranding mastermind Hideo Kojima.