British-Finnish songwriter otta announces the arrival of her ambitious new album ASTRA, set for release on 20th November via her new label löyly, alongside the mesmerising and abstract eight-and-a-half-minute single MEZZANINE. The new track offers the first glimpse into an album that finds otta pushing her distinctive approach to experimental pop even further, dismantling conventional genre boundaries and building dense, intricate soundscapes from the ground up.
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MEZZANINE is an expansive piece that refuses to settle into a conventional structure. Across its extended runtime, instrumentation continually shifts and evolves, creating an immersive collage in which rhythm, texture, voice and atmosphere become equally important. Rather than following a straightforward narrative, multiple ideas appear to exist simultaneously, leaving the listener to find their own route through the song.
For otta, that sense of immersion is central to the track: “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,” she explains. “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.”
She likens the finished piece to “a big painting”, with layers of textures and different narratives revealing themselves gradually rather than presenting everything immediately: “I just wanted it to feel like you’re in the song when you’re listening to it,” she adds.
The accompanying video, directed and edited by Ciara Reddy, mirrors that intimate and abstract quality, providing a visual counterpart to a song that deliberately resists easy categorisation.
MEZZANINE also provides an important introduction to the philosophy behind ASTRA. The album represents a striking evolution for an artist whose work has consistently existed somewhere between experimental music, indie, electronic pop, R&B and jazz, but this time otta has taken an unusually self-contained approach.
Every instrument heard on ASTRA was performed by otta herself, making it the most self-sufficient record in her catalogue to date. Mixing duties were handled by Dilip Harris, known for his work with artists including King Krule and Little Dragon, bringing another creative perspective to an album otherwise constructed almost entirely by its creator.
That independence marks another stage in an artistic journey that has always balanced solitude with collaboration. Otta began her solo career while still barely out of adolescence, with her early music already displaying an unusual fascination with uncertainty, introspection and the blurred emotional territory of early adulthood.
Her first EPs, released through BOKKLE, were shaped in part by producer and musician kwes., while drummer Morgan Simpson contributed his explosive yet highly intricate playing to later work. Those collaborations helped establish a sound defined by contrasts — delicate and abrasive, intimate and expansive, organic and electronic.
Her 2025 album With Love From Everywhere pushed that approach into even more kinetic territory, drawing on elements of free jazz and art pop. ASTRA, however, takes a different route. Where that record often felt restless and outward-looking, the new album emerges from a period in which otta’s world became dramatically smaller. The circumstances surrounding the record are crucial to understanding its atmosphere.
Following the disruption of the pandemic, otta became seriously unwell after contracting coronavirus. The illness developed into a chronic fatigue condition that left her incapacitated and dramatically restricted her ability to engage with the outside world. While life around her gradually began to return to normal, her own existence remained confined. Activities that might ordinarily have been insignificant could become major exertions, while reaching out into the world carried the possibility of physical collapse.
In that enforced stillness, listening became a form of participation. Otta began recording the world around her from her window, capturing birds, aircraft and even a school parade as they passed by. Those everyday sounds have subsequently become part of ASTRA’s musical fabric, turning the apparently mundane details of a restricted life into components of an expansive sonic world.
The album’s fixation on small, fleeting details consequently takes on a deeper significance. Rather than attempting to escape the confines of her circumstances through grand gestures, otta finds material in the accumulation of tiny observations — the sounds, textures and moments that remain available even when the wider world feels impossibly distant. That tension between confinement and a desire to reach beyond it runs throughout ASTRA.
The album also carries strong geographical traces, particularly from Lisbon, where elements of its musical identity began to take shape. Bossa nova rhythms appear throughout the record, while string arrangements evoke the work of composer Claus Ogerman, opening up associations with Brazil and the wider Lusophone world.
Yet ASTRA isn’t ultimately an album about any one location. Instead, its emotional centre lies in the sensation of distance itself. Yearning becomes its defining mood: the desire to move beyond one’s immediate circumstances, to connect with something or someone just out of reach, and to keep looking outward despite the impossibility of completely closing the distance.
That idea is reflected in the title MEZZANINE, which refers to an architectural space existing between levels. The concept of transition becomes a recurring presence throughout the album, with its songs populated by spectral figures and fragments that seem to hover just beyond capture.
Connection remains the ultimate goal, even when complete connection is impossible. The album’s title introduces another dimension to that idea. With its gaze directed towards the stars, ASTRA turns its attention away from the immediate physical world and towards something distant and unknowable.
In that sense, the record can be viewed as a companion to With Love From Everywhere. Where the earlier album burned with the intensity of a collapsing star, ASTRA occupies the space that follows — the fragments and debris continuing outward into the vastness of space.
That cosmic perspective isn’t presented as an escape or a promise of salvation. The stars remain impossibly far away. They offer direction rather than a destination, providing something to look towards when the ground beneath you becomes difficult to navigate. For an artist whose recent life has been shaped by physical limitation and enforced stillness, that distinction is particularly powerful.
ASTRA doesn’t pretend that transcendence is guaranteed. Instead, it embraces uncertainty as the reason to keep moving, creating, listening and reaching outward. MEZZANINE is therefore more than simply a first single. At eight-and-a-half minutes, it acts as an expansive doorway into the album’s world, introducing the layered instrumentation, intimate recordings and unresolved emotional spaces that define ASTRA.
With every instrument performed by otta herself and the sounds of the everyday world woven into its sonic architecture, the album promises to be one of the most personal and ambitious chapters of her career so far.
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