Dania - Listless (2025)

At night, things shift. In shadow, the world operates strangely, ecosystems transform, and boundaries between seen and unseen dissolve. Often viewed solely as a place where fear and odious forces gather, these are also the ‘small hours,’ and a parallel realm where people, places, and things appear and act differently. The world sits in a different harmony in the dark, dream and fantasy pulling closer to our fingertips; it’s when the intricate flowers of the Japanese snake gourd, which only blooms at night, reveal themselves to the moon, as if they belong to another realm entirely. “I see it when I work the night shift, this otherworld,” says Dania, who splits her time between life in Barcelona and night shifts as an emergency doctor in remote corners of Australia.

All composed after midnight, Listless is a reflection of that liminality, communicating from that nocturnal space. Buoyed by layers of transcendent vocals, it embraces the quietly potent power of everything that only comes to life in the dark and blooms out of sight. Her first time deploying drums into her songs, Dania’s production draws from a deep well of oneiric musics, ultimately forging a fresh and emotionally psychedelic syntax. “It’s not a pop record,” she says, “but it’s the closest thing I’ve ever made to one.”

Following a series of highly conceptual works exploring the topography of identity, colonialism, and how the two interleave, Dania set out to tap into something more emotive and instinctive, drawing inspiration from this strange energy of the night. Listless sketches a portrait of this time and place not easily seen or described, reskinning reality to reveal something new. At one point, she even intones to a subject, “your face is coloured differently in the sun.”

On “Heart Shaped Burn”, Rupert Clervaux’s visceral percussion ignites a drone-and-drums ritual inspired by an experience working the night shift in Australia. “It’s named after a heart shaped burn of a patient,” says Dania. “Her partner had poured scalding water on her chest. She was initially timid and closed off, but when I pointed out the perfectly heart shaped burn we laughed together, both realising the dark irony.” Elsewhere, downtempo beats and chants spiral on “Car Crash Premonition,” a song written in the aftermath of a harrowing taxi ride to the studio at 3am. “He was a reckless taxi driver, and I thought ‘this is it,’ and then a second later my life flashed before my eyes and we narrowly avoided a crash.”

Dania created Listless’ landscape of dark irony, deep introspection, and liberation from the daylight world. These tracks are future hymns for liminal spaces – and an invitation to drift to the otherworld waiting after midnight. [u][/u]