Runoff

Water flows through Camila Ortiz’s second record as Otracami. The Brooklyn-based songwriter compares someone—a lover, perhaps—to “standing water,” describes them as “clear as the water” that “runs down my throat.” Liquid shape-shifts in the environment around her: There’s a puddle on the floor, a plume of steam, a pile of snow that “breaks off like breadcrumbs.” Runoff is named for the currents that collect when precipitation or irrigation provide more water than the earth can absorb. Fittingly, Ortiz’s spectral yet sturdy songs inspect questions of excess and interiority, accumulating new ideas as they move forward with fluid grace.

Ortiz has said many of Runoff’s songs describe a time in her life when she was “trying out leaving for the first time”—a process that sometimes felt liberating and other times forced a retreat. The narrators of these songs are often navigating the distance between uncertainty and assuredness—recounting ambiguous touches, half-remembered dreams, unasked questions. But a couple of Runoff’s standout tracks blend her personal experience with literary sources, and Ortiz has a knack for drawing these fantastical inspirations back down to earth.

“Sirens” was loosely inspired by the Greek myth of the titular creatures’ origins, transformed from handmaidens into bird-woman hybrids after the goddess Persephone was abducted into the underworld. The song makes reference to the ancient fable—its narrator recalls how she “grew wings” and “was cursed with flight”—but Ortiz’s soft, lilting voice and unhurried guitar riffs ensure it never tips into folkloric kitsch. When she murmurs, “The night that I lost you/I knew I was lost too,” toward the song’s end, you’d be forgiven for thinking she was singing about a relatably terrestrial break-up. She pulls off something similar on “Perfect Reach,” inspired by the Argentine horror novel Our Share of Night: “I reach out for/You in the other place,” Ortiz sings, haunted and heartsick, in a voice so sweet that her allusions to the novel’s occult themes stave off any potential melodrama.

Ortiz builds most of Runoff’s songs off fingerpicked guitars and her crystalline voice, often building her compositions to dense, cathartic swells. “Lose You” ramps up to a foreboding coda, the album’s heaviest moment, where Ortiz repeats “I can lose you” in a frenzied tone over fuzzed-out distortion. “Please” begins with primary colors—Ortiz singing over strummed guitar —before she’s joined, bit by bit, by the rest of the band: keys, bass, simple percussion; by the song’s final minute, all the stacked elements seem to shimmer, incandescent. Three-quarters of the way through “The Wait,” the layers of delicate guitar riffs and complex percussion beneath Ortiz’s voice all drop out, briefly, only to rush back in like a tidal wave hitting a beach. By the time we reach “Penny Frog,” the album’s final track, containing its simplest arrangement, there’s a sense of relief as Runoff’s flood of sounds and emotions slows to a gentle stream.

Ortiz sneaks field recordings and samples into these songs, too—each adding texture to the universe of her songs and evoking the wider world that exists just outside the frame of her narration. A snippet of conversation opens “Headphones,” while a door slams shut halfway through “Please.” A few well-placed sounds in the middle of “Can’t Go Back” illustrate that conversation between internal and external, underscoring the album’s themes of tentative new beginnings and emotional overflow. The track treads with a cautious cadence through its first verse and refrain, then pauses. We hear birds chirping, a bell chiming, a door opening; suddenly, the song lurches forward, propelled by a new velocity. It sounds like Otracami stepping across a threshold—trying out an exit and moving swiftly into the unknown.