We first wrote about Otracami (Camila Ortiz) a few weeks ago when she introduced “Sirens”, an early taste off of her upcoming album Runoff. The record arrives March 20 via Figure & Ground and brings together eleven songs shaped during a time of personal transition. Across the album, the Brooklyn-based songwriter and composer layers intricate vocals, field recordings, and samples into rich full band arrangements, reflecting a period of experimentation and movement in her life. “I was trying out leaving for the first time—people and jobs and situations with family,” she explains. “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.” Drawing from both her life in New York and memories of Northern California, Runoff explores the tension between feeling contained and spilling over.
Her new single “Perfect Reach” opens another intimate window into the record’s atmosphere. The song started during a winter songwriting class taught by Adrianne Lenker through School of Song, where Ortiz built the track around a delicate fingerpicked guitar pattern. At the same time, she was immersed in Mariana Enriquez’s novel Our Share of Night, whose dark, haunted tone seeped into the mood of the piece. Rather than writing from a clear storyline, Ortiz followed images and sensations until the emotional core appeared. “The song is about resisting the pull toward someone you’ve wronged—feeling both frantic and totally frozen in place,” she says. Written in the stillness of deep winter, “Perfect Reach” captures the strange inner world that can unfold when everything outside feels paused. In the lyrics, that tension surfaces through fragile images and quiet longing, with lines like “lean out into the other place” and “straining my arms I couldn’t be far I reach for you in the other place,” which evoke a restless attempt to bridge a distance that perhaps shouldn’t be crossed. The song may feel more straightforward than “Sirens”, but “Perfect Reach” is every bit as haunting.
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