otta
- bizzarre
- 3 hours ago
- 4 min read
British-Finnish songwriter otta announces new album ASTRA and shares new single “MEZZANINE”. New album out 20th November via löyly.
Today, British-Finnish songwriter otta returns with the details of her new album ASTRA. Out 20th November on otta’s new label löyly, the new record is accompanied by an intimate and abstract new single / video titled “MEZZANINE” directed and edited by Ciara Reddy, an eight-and-a-half-minute introduction to the latest stage in a journey of ambitious and far-reaching musical development.
Less drawing from than wholly dismantling wide stylistic spectrums of music, the dense collages of sound which define otta’s work could be described as a musique concrète approach to contemporary pop. Thematically otta has also always occupied a singular space. Starting her solo career barely out of adolescence, her first single “Near Enough a Woman” already evinces an anxious liminality, one perhaps inherent to early adulthood, but nonetheless appearing particularly striking in her presentation.
But if otta’s voice has always been defined by a certain predilection for introspection, the path of her career nonetheless was one equally charted amidst community. Notable contributors have included Warp Record’s kwes. who helped define otta’s first few critically acclaimed EPs, all of which were released on his label BOKKLE. Also, black midi’s Morgan Simpson whose equal parts explosive and intricate percussion style provided a perfect accompaniment to otta’s artistry of extreme contrasts. It is clear then that the elaboration of her voice was not done alone, but rather, amidst a kaleidoscopic cast of complementary creativity. Even ASTRA, a unique entry in otta’s discography for the extent of its self-sufficiency (the entirety of its instrumentation was performed by the artist alone) sees her forging new connections, with Dilip Harris (King Krule, Little Dragon) taking up mixing duties.
otta’s most recent record, 2025's With Love From Everywhere, could be seen, at least in the initial period of its production, as the culmination of that process. Its hyperkinetic sound, drawing equally from free jazz as it does art pop, appears as much a testament to otta’s discerning curation of musical collaborators as it does the uniqueness of her vision.
“MEZZANINE”, the first taste of otta’s new album, solidifies that notion. Stretching to nearly half the runtime of her entire previous album, it traverses an ever more expansive yet indeterminate arc as words dictated directly into her laptop’s inbuilt microphone eschew allegory or any other ornamental excess, resisting neat narrative coherence.
Speaking on the single otta says,
“it gets a bit abstract, but it’s also pop music… There are multiple narratives occurring - the instrumentation is kind of a whole story in itself. It was really addictive to work on, I played around with it for ages, mainly just because it was so much fun, every sound was something I played and considered right till the very end.
It is sort of like a big painting, nothing is just surface level or as it seems, different narratives, textures, magic etc… I just wanted it to feel like you’re in the song when you’re listening to it”
otta's previous EP With Love From Everywhere was delayed initially by impediments of a quiet universal character – the pandemic. But then, almost at the very moment of the world’s rebirth, otta herself would contract the coronavirus. That initial infection then metastasized into a chronic fatigue condition, leaving her incapacitated. As the wider world reemerged once again, hers would contract around her.
It is in appreciation of that infinitesimal smallness of experience suddenly imposed on her that the true significance of ASTRA’s fixation on the ephemera of everyday life begins to come into focus. Since it is impossible to write about nothing, about emptiness itself, the album consists of filling the void with the endless accumulation of things.
Equally, the detachment which defines the album’s opening overture appears more poignant contextualised against the debilitation of a fatigue condition, one in which every exertion, each extension back into the world, simultaneously contained the threat of collapse.
Often able to do little more than listen to the world go by, otta would record the mise-en-scène of her experience, capturing the sound of birds, planes and even a passing school parade as they drifted by her window. Those samples now provide much of the record’s sonic texture.
Other more oblique traces of the places in which the album was recorded can be discerned. Lisbon in particular looms large. From the bossa nova rhythms which undergird many songs, to the Claus Ogerman evoking string arrangements, much of the album implicates the outer limits of the Lusophone world, conjuring Brazil, that country beyond the eternity of ocean in which Lisbon’s city limits dissolve. But while certain geographic correspondences can be traced, ASTRA’s true circumstance isn’t any particular place, but in a way, its absence. If ASTRA possesses a definitive affective register, it is of yearning.
That aspiration to extend, beyond oneself as much as one’s situation, is alluded to in “MEZZANINE,” even the title itself referencing a kind of architectural embodiment of transition. It is also discernable in the spectral presences which haunt the album. Never quite capturable, they seem an acknowledgement of the unbridgeable distances which exist between each of us but which we are nonetheless constantly compelled to reach across in search of connection.
Most of all, it is evoked in the album’s astrological orientation. In many ways the companion piece to last year’s album, if With Love From Everywhere immolated with the intensity of an imploding star, ASTRA has the air of its aftermath, like detritus spilling out into the cosmos.
Gaze fixed firmly on the firmament; ASTRA seems to strive for transcendence but appears equally aware that that journey will remain ever incomplete. The true significance of the stars inheres in their unconquerable distance. They offer not destinations, nor salvation, but only an orientation away from the earth and all its burdens. Nothing is promised, nor can it be, since it is the uncertainty itself which is the very impetus for the journey.
ASTRA is a reminder that even in the most oppressive darkness, shafts of light will puncture through, and perhaps guide those with an ear attuned to their ever-elusive meaning.
