Dalila Kayros announces new album 'Khthonie'
Dalila Kayros
Announces new album Khthonie
Out 4th April via Subsound Records
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Dalila Kayros
Announces new album Khthonie
Out 4th April via Subsound Records
New album from Sardinia-based duo
Album: Khthonie
Label: Subsound Records
Release: 04/04/2025
Today, Dalila Kayros shares details of her new album Khthonie, due out 4th April via Subsound Records.
Vocalist and avant-pop musician Dalila Kayros is an artistic shapeshifter. It’s there in how she sings, how she combines disparate genres, and how she reinvents her persona with each album. Now, she pushes her voice to the limits in service of storytelling. “The voice doesn’t have to be beautiful in a pleasurable way”, she says. “It doesn’t have to be accommodating always, but it must express the feeling of what is going on in our surroundings, in this apocalyptic time.”
In that spirit, her latest offering, Khthonie fights for fluidity through a boundless approach to writing and performance. It’s a record of intentional tonal and emotional clashes, as clear from her sardonic smile on the cover - beaming while staring into the abyss. Made with her close-knit collaborator Danilo Casti using their Sardinian surroundings as a base, the record was inspired by chthonian deities of Greek mythology, who rules the underworld before the formation of the earth.
Kayros embodies the dark and destructive qualities of these Gods with screamed vocals and sudden shifts in mood, while Danilo Casti’s generative electronic production adds an element of unruly chance to their performances. In doing so, they create a vision of a fluid earth, before lands were named and laws conquered. “For me, Khthonie is a free earth”, she says. “Free of boundaries, free of marriage, free of human external rules.”
On the menacing and time-shifting single ‘Mitza’, the pair were inspired by Sardinian incubation, an ancient rite which tells of driving away nightmares and visions. “'Mitza’ in Sardinian means source, from water,” Kayros says of the song. “The source is your unconscious, which will tell you the answers.” Fittingly, many of her melodies first form in dreams. Kayros awakes scrambling to get ideas down, before honing them with knowledge taken from her studies in musical psychology and years of performance.
‘Sakramonade’ is the first taste of Kayros’ more raw vocal character, aptly matched with crushing electronics and a hypnotic self-penned Sardinian rhyme. “It’s about a transformation from a state of pain to liberation”, Kayros says. The pair make sure that’s felt musically, by pushing the emotion to a state of emergency with bubbling uncertainty and ear-catching melodies.
Kayros and Casti have performed together for years. For them, the stage is the first place of composition. While their previous record Animami was more structured and fixed, Khthonie takes the opposite approach. Many of its initial drafts were made while touring the US in 2023, ideas formed and stretched through reactive improvisation. “When we toured the United States, we couldn’t bring all our gear, so we took a smaller set up”, Casti says - a limitation that led to invention. “We took back our freedom to express ourselves during this tour. Gig by gig, we developed, and by gig twelve we realised that we had a new album.”
That freedom of form first inspired Kayros through singing. A trained jazz vocalist, she experienced a shift in perspective when she began to truly listen to her speaking voice to bring its characteristics into her performance. “I tried to find my real voice, exploring all its forms and subtleties,” she says. “That realisation opened up a new world.”
As she became more aware of her voice, the playful sound explorations around her – the noises of dogs, the crumbling of rocks, the hum of everyday life, and even the babbling she made as a child – became key to her singing. This experimentation evolved into formalised research on vocal sound, inspired by musicians like Demetrio Stratos. On this latest project, she makes every noise count.
“The voice is a sacrificial act.” she says. “When you sing, you are gifting your breath to another person, to the collective or to the wind. You are expressing your emotions in the present. It could be happy, but it could be very bad too. Dissonances in nature are an alarm or a warning.”
In her latest iteration, Dalila Kayros brings dissonance and beauty as a wake-up call and rallying cry, to view the present moment as not so fixed in place.
