Otracami – Sirens
Otracami, the project of Brooklyn-based songwriter and composer Camila Ortiz, shares second single “Sirens” today, ahead of her forthcoming album Runoff, due March 20 via Figure & Ground.
Arriving on the heels of lead single “Please,” which Remezcla praised as part of an “intimate yet ambitious new album,” “Sirens” weaves myth and personal reflection into a sweeping track that showcases Ortiz’s strengths as both storyteller and vocalist.
Originally written for a gallery installation at Art Basel, “Sirens” draws inspiration from the myth of Persephone’s handmaidens, transformed into monsters after her abduction to the underworld. Despite its mythological origins, the song evolved into something more personal. “‘Sirens’ is the only song on the album that wasn’t written from my POV, but obviously whenever you write a song like that, it still ends up reflecting what’s happening for you,” Ortiz explains. “The song is about how much you owe somebody you work for—where the boundaries are when something bad happens. How much are you responsible for, and does it matter?”
The track arrives alongside a music video created by Ortiz’s longtime collaborator Sai Tripathi, which premiered earlier today with FLOOD. “We’ve been working together visually since middle school, when we started making music videos for my songs,” Ortiz shares. “She had specific images and qualities of movement in mind, centered around this creature character, and we brought it to life in LA at the beach.”
Across the eleven tracks of Runoff, Otracami layers intricate vocals, field recordings, and samples into full-band arrangements that feel overfull with life, mirroring the album’s central tension between containment and overflow. “I was trying out leaving for the first time—people and jobs and situations with family,” reflects Ortiz. “It was real trial and error—sometimes that really worked and felt liberating and other times I had to turn around and go back. It was a period of big experimentation.”
On Runoff, Otracami draws from both the landscapes of her life in New York and her childhood in Northern California, which was the setting for her debut album’s uneasy coming-of-age narratives. “The stuff I used to make felt like it was much smoother and that kind of feels like California—there’s this open, flat, uncanny smoothness to everything. New York feels murkier, there’s more friction out in the open, just in the way that people relate to each other. I think that made the music more angular and expressive.”
In New York, Otracami connected with the collaborators that helped shape Runoff’s sonic world: the album features guitarist and engineer Andres Abenante (Birthing Hips, Jaybird Studio), drummer Jon Starks (My Trio, jondownload), bassist Jesse Bielenberg (Dora Jar, altopalo) and was mixed and mastered by Lee Meadvin (Kalia Vandever, Claire Dickson). “I wanted it to feel more loose, more lush, more live and alive. I feel like this record is more about the band and the arrangements that we made together—we had been playing together for a few years but bringing them this music felt like a turning point because it was more collaborative.”
Through songs about fluctuating intimacy in love, family, and work, Otracami grapples with feelings of confinement, the desire for freedom, and the moment of escape in all its destructive glory.
Listen and watch “Sirens” above and stay tuned for more music from Otracami ahead of the full release of Runoff arriving March 20 via Figure & Ground.
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