Some of the greatest moments in Danny Harle’s life have involved stumbling on a new pop song and being transported to another dimension.
“I remember when I first heard Blue, by Eiffel 65. It inspired this otherworldly feeling in me. It sounds as if that voice is coming from another planet. It’s got an alien beauty. It sends my imagination wild. ‘Where is this? It isn’t from this place. It’s escapist’.”
As a producer, Harle has worked with some of the biggest talents in pop, including Charli XCX, PinkPantheress, Caroline Polachek and Dua Lipa. Now the musician credited with helping to create the voguish “hyperpop” sound is stepping from behind the curtains and releasing an album of his own, the brilliantly otherworldly Cerulean. It is, he says, a whole new experience.
“It’s so overwhelming,” says Harle, who has spent the morning taping personalised messages for the venues around the world that will host global screening events of the record (technically his second long-player, after the rave-infused Harlecore, from 2021, but one that he regards as his first album proper). “There’s so much – so many things that are always extra, that take so much time that I forget about them.”
A conversation with Harle is a bit of a rollercoaster ride. Speaking from his home in London, he waxes at length about his collaborators – he’s especially thrilled his old pal Charli XCX has finally become a megastar – and lays out his thesis about why the video game Bloodborne is one of the greatest works of art of the 21st century.
Above all, he fizzles with enthusiasm for Cerulean, a collection of bangers and blistering soundscapes that will appeal to fans of Brat summers and grimdark PlayStation classics alike. He hopes it will find its audience, but he’s equally adamant about not wanting to become a pop star himself. There can only be one Charli XCX.
Cliched though it may sound, he wants the focus to be on his songs, not on him as an individual. “When some people try to treat me like a pop star, that makes me uncomfortable, because that’s not what I’m aiming to be,” he says. “It’s the album itself that is a musical statement.”
Cerulean is a fascinating album that leans into the high-tempo sound for which Harle is famous – a more-is-more vibe the music press christened “hyperpop” in the early 2010s.
Back then he was best known for his association with the label PC Music and its founder, AG Cook – a fellow pioneer, who likewise embraced a maximalist aesthetic that blended the yammering energy of hard-core rave with the sonorous bass of grime and the sheer, jaws-on-the-floor ecstasy of eurodance.
Danny Harle performs on stage in Turin, Italy. Photograph: Filippo Alfero/Getty Images
How does Harle feel about the “hyperpop” label today? He shrugs. It isn’t something he thinks about.
“I’m unfortunately kind of unaware of the associations people have with my music – always have been. Terms like hyperpop … I’m really happy and interested in the way that things get understood and digested by listeners and journalists. But I don’t let it influence what I do whatsoever,” he says.
“I don’t actually read journalism about music – although I do think journalism is unbelievably important and undervalued, especially these days, and I think it’s in a state of crisis, and journalists should be properly paid. There needs to be some model built for that.”
One of the most striking tracks on the record is Starlight, a study in sonic excess that features vocals from PinkPantheress, the young London singer whose in-your-face music has made her a face of hyperpop (even if her influences run more towards garage and jungle).
As with many of the artists Harle loves, she is both a traditional pop star – her songs come with catchy melodies as standard – and unapologetically avant-garde. Many of her tunes clock in at less than two minutes; sometimes she doesn’t even bother with a chorus or hook – though that’s not the case on the fantastically twinkling Starlight.
“As soon as I heard her music I knew that we aligned in the way that we see things. She’s always checked in on me. She had me listen to her album when it was in production, and has talked about me as a sort of mentor figure for her. We’ve got on and had a similar sort of outlook on things,” Harle says.
He respects the way “she can make an album which is very clearly a pop album” while refusing to compromise as a musician. “There is no sense of cynically going to LA, getting a hit written for her, or anything like that.”
Amid the dazzling collaborations with A-list friends such as Polachek, Lipa and Clairo, Cerulean carves out space for quieter numbers – haunting instrumentals inspired, according to the album press release, by the punishingly difficult video game Dark Souls.
How do they connect? Harle gushes about the game’s maverick creator, Hidetaka Miyazaki – not to be confused with the Studio Ghibli animator Hayao Miyazaki – and the way the sadistic difficulty of Miyazaki classics such as Elden Ring and Bloodborne is an extension of its creator’s worldview. Some things in life require hard work and buy-in from the audience – and it’s okay if occasionally those include video games.
“The funny thing is that these games are referred to as ‘too hard’. That’s how they are digested. Imagine if somebody said that about an art-house film or a Tarkovsky film. Imagine: I tried to watch that film and it was ‘too hard’. With music and films there is a sense that if it’s a more challenging film, you can sort of engage with it. But there’s no sense of engagement with a video game.
“There’s a sense that it’s got to be entertaining and easy, otherwise what’s the point? But if something is a work of art, sometimes you have to engage with it a bit more. The way in which that was sort of integrated into my album … I guess I don’t know. It’s a thing that’s on my mind all the time. I think games are so fantastic. It is maybe a shared thing. You could say that is a principle that’s very important to Miyazaki with the way he makes games.”
Harle was born in London. The son of the saxophonist John Harle, he had a privileged upbringing, attending the £30,000 a year King Alfred School in Hampstead, and went on to study at the Royal Academy of Music and then Goldsmiths, part of the University of London, where he began to make music with Cook, an old friend from his school days.
This led to PC Music, a giddy, gaudy aberration at a time when the British recording industry was still sweating the last vestiges of the landfill-indie scene out of its system. Among those with whom he worked during the label’s early days was a young Charli XCX, then an obscure songwriter and producer from Essex.
He is not surprised that she has become a global star. Nor is he shocked that the LP to bring her that success was the in-your-face Brat, arguably her first completely unfiltered release, on which she made no apologies for being Charli XCX.
“Her personality is so infectious and it’s so relatable, even when she’s talking about doing something wrong or messy. She’s so articulate. [Brat] expresses such a combination of ideas that are emotionally intelligent and also just really satisfying.
“It’s the rawness of it. It is a truly holistic product. She was as much a part of the album doing well – in interviews she was embodying the project. It was a funny combination of her stopping trying to make pop hits and being the pop hit.”
He is under no illusion about Cerulean kicking off a Brat-style Danny Harle summer. It isn’t that sort of record. Quite the opposite: it is a beautifully immersive listen, an album that expands horizons and takes the audience to strange new places. In a best-case scenario, he would like listeners to feel as if they’ve been packed into a rocket ship and blasted to a parallel universe.
“Escapism, alien beauty: these words come up a lot in terms of what I’m trying to sort of cast with my music,” he says, coming back around to his love of Blue (Da Ba Dee) by Eiffel 65.
“If you listen to the first track on the album, Noctilucence, it’s one minute long. But, for me, it illuminates a landscape in my head, and I hope it does for other people as well. The thing that I find cool about that is that for each individual it will be different. It’s meant to set your imagination on fire and light up this world inside your head.”
Cerulean is released on Friday, February 13th. Danny Harle plays Button Factory, Dublin, on Friday, February 20th