¡Ay!


¡Ay! is a studio album by Lucrecia Dalt, a Colombian musician based in Berlin. It was released on 14 October 2022 through RVNG Intl. It received universal acclaim from critics.

Background

¡Ay! is Lucrecia Dalt's first solo studio album since No Era Sólida. In between, she collaborated with Aaron Dilloway on Lucy & Aaron and composed the scores for The Seed and The Baby. ¡Ay! tells the story of an alien named Preta who visits the planet Earth. On the album, Dalt sings the lyrics in Spanish. The album's title translates to "Oh!" in English. Music videos were released for the songs "No Tiempo", "Atemporal", "Dicen", and "Enviada".

Critical reception

Chris Richards of The Washington Post described the album as "a richly percussive, luxuriously spacious recording, with Dalt singing tenderly over various bolero-shaped rhythms, each song unspooling patiently, inviting you to notice its details." Paul Simpson of AllMusic stated, "Much heavier on acoustic instrumentation than Dalt's previous albums, the record has a bit of a space-age exotica feel, giving the impression of an extraterrestrial's first encounters with Latin American music." He added, "With ¡Ay!, Dalt succeeds at constructing and exploring an elaborate sound world that resembles a surreal reflection of her past." Bernie Brooks of The Quietus commented that "the real strength of Dalt's work on ¡Ay! lies not in its strangeness but in how deftly it navigates and defines its relationship with the past, while doing something novel in the present, and charting out new paths forward into the future."

Personnel

Credits adapted from liner notes.