With DALE’s new album, “Vertigo,” you don’t press play so much as you unlock a door to a strangely familiar apartment, one where every room is a different state of mind. It’s a work of meticulous interior design, built from the sleek, moody synths that sound less like a tribute to the 80s and more like an artifact from a parallel version of that decade—one imagined in Milano, where the chrome was sleeker and the heartbreak had better lighting. This is synth-pop that feels architectural, constructing spaces for introspection before inviting you to dance in them.
The entire album functions like a psychic progression, a transit from a locked room to an open-air rooftop. It begins with the narrator standing paralyzed at the edge of an emotional ocean in “Waves,” asking the tide for directions because their own compass is spinning. You can almost feel the cold water lapping at the ankles of their indecision. This sense of being stuck, of being haunted by the past’s gravitational pull, is a current running through the initial tracks. In “Break Your Heart,” DALE offers one of the most uncomfortably honest mea culpas I’ve heard in a long time; it’s a memory so sharp it ruins other songs, a past mistake that hasn’t faded but calcified.
Then there’s the title track, “Vertigo.” It’s the feeling you get when you’ve climbed very high on a ladder of self-preservation, presenting a “bulletproof” exterior to the world, only to look down and realize you’re terrified of the fall. The thrumming anxiety beneath the polished production is palpable. It reminds me of those antique phrenology heads, those porcelain maps of the human psyche that tried to locate “sublimity” and “secretiveness” on the skull. DALE is doing something similar here, but his tools are drum machines and reverb tails, and he’s charting the vast, un-locatable territory between who we pretend to be and who we are when nobody’s looking.
But this isn’t an album that languishes in fear. The turn is electric. “Vortex” arrives like a sudden, brilliant clearing in the weather, a dizzying moment of surrender to another person that feels less like a fall and more like flight. From here, the body takes over. The nocturnal, hedonistic pulse of “Moonlight” and the decisive stride of “Shadows” transform the dance floor into a stage for catharsis. It’s the physical manifestation of the mental journey; the limbs finally get to work out the problems the mind has been wrestling with. It’s not about escaping the self, but about fully inhabiting a new, more liberated one.
Even the quieter confessions shift in tone. If “Break Your Heart” was an apology for the past, “I’m A Mess” is a fragile proposal for the future—a breathtakingly vulnerable act of laying all your chaotic, broken pieces on the table and hoping someone will see a mosaic instead of a pile of shards. And the fight in “Illusion,” a raw severing from the reflection of a despised elder, feels earned. It’s the sound of someone smashing the mirror they’ve been forced to look into their whole life and finally liking what they see in the fragments.
Closing with the wistful memory of “In My Dreams,” a track about an adolescent crush whose face is now a “blur,” is a masterful stroke. After a record of such intense self-examination and confrontation, it ends not with a grand statement, but with the gentle haze of an unresolved memory. The journey of becoming ourselves, DALE seems to suggest, doesn’t erase the sweet, fuzzy ghosts of who we once were. They just don’t have control anymore.
What, then, does “Vertigo” leave you with once the synths fade? It’s not an answer, but a feeling—the quiet hum of a mind settling after a period of profound upheaval. It asks you to consider your own internal architecture, the hidden anxieties and the dance floors waiting within. Whose blurry face from your own past does this music conjure?
