Marina Herlop Announces New Self-Released Album, Dja Dja

Music

Written by Wil

Catalan composer, vocalist and pianist Marina Herlop has announced her fifth studio album, Dja Dja, due out October 9th on vinyl, CD, and digital formats.

The record marks her first self-release, following two albums on PAN and an earlier pair of piano-led works that first established her as one of the more singular voices in contemporary avant-garde music.

Herlop built the album using the Hero’s Journey as an underlying structure, a kind of scaffolding she used to organise the material before letting it fall away once the songs could stand on their own. She has compared the album’s intricate architecture to a giant Sudoku, with each track functioning as its own self-contained puzzle piece within a larger, unified body of work.

By her own account, the three years spent making Dja Dja were defined less by conquest than by endurance: a process rooted in reflection, creative friction, and a quiet insistence on doing things her own way. That insistence is reflected in the decision to release the album independently, giving her full control over a project she felt could not accommodate the compromises that come with outside involvement.

Much of Dja Dja was recorded by Herlop herself at home, with the arrangement of harmony, instrumentation, tempo, and meter mapped out over months on a large cardboard diagram kept on her studio floor. Gamelan parts were tracked with musicians in Bali, and longtime collaborator Adri González (Adri Goor) — who also features on the track “Vas volant” — worked closely with Herlop throughout as a kind of musical advisor, weighing in on structure, timbre, and mix.

<a href="https://marinaherlop.bandcamp.com/album/dja-dja">Dja Dja by Marina Herlop</a>

Sonically, the album folds in new elements for Herlop, including gamelan textures and orchestral brass, alongside the interlaced vocal and instrumental layering that has defined her sound to date. Early glimpses — the piano-and-brass interplay of “Jaque,” the whistling tones and rhythmic bass of “Vas Volant,” and the orchestral sweep of “Bliss” — suggest an artist expanding her palette while staying rooted in the same meticulous, otherworldly sensibility that has drawn comparisons to Björk, Fever Ray, Diamanda Galás, and composers like Steve Reich and Michael Nyman.

True to the album’s spirit of self-sufficiency, its rollout is deliberately stripped of visual excess, with Herlop preferring to let the music generate its own imagery in the listener’s mind rather than dictate a fixed narrative.

Dja Dja is out October 9th, self-released. Pre-Order here

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