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Jul 12, 2022 By Caleb Campbell

For a few years now, Kramies has been circling the world of dreamy indie pop, releasing a handful of EPs and racking up recent high-profile collaborations with Jason Lytle of Grandaddy and Tyler Ramsey of Band of Horses. This year, he is set to share his new self-titled LP, and he has teased the record with a pair of new singles, “Days Of” (featuring Jason Lytle and Patrick Carney of The Black Keys) and “Ohio I’ll Be Fine.” Today, he’s back with another new single, “Hotel in LA,” premiering early with Under the Radar.

“Hotel in LA” is a work of syrupy dream folk, with nostaligic storytelling running beneath layers of guitar and droning sonics. The track takes on the ethereal quality of a waking dreamscape, soaking Kramies’ vocals in a warm bath of acoustic guitars, eerie synths, and lush aesthetic touches. Amidst the thick layers of instrumentation, Kramies traces a portrait of longing melancholia, dreaming of a lost love and forgetten memories一“As far as we can be/A teenage tragedy/Cocaine and all your love/Could never be enough/Could never be enough.”

“I have kept a lot of memorabilia, photos and letters from my past. Especially stuff from touring and travels. I’ve had a pretty unique life as an artist so I’m glad every time I move to a new place to find old memories of things I might have otherwise forgotten about. I wrote ‘Hotel in LA’ on a day that I found an old letter from someone I used to care about. It was a fond memory even though it might have sounded a bit sad. Most of my songs seem to have that element. In the letter was a paragraph on how we joked about having to make a hotel that was falling apart in California into something lovely by hanging photos over the cracked and water stained walls, eventually filling the walls with 1000 frames.

I’ve never known how these songs come about and through me but this one was a special moment in time. The letter and lyrics came from the time when I was at the height of my drug addiction before I got clean. The song was originally titled ‘Shitty Hotel in LA.’ It kind of follows that timeline of my life where there was a beautiful blur between the lines of what was real and what was nostalgia in the making. I write a lot these days, and the best part about this song was that I captured it on a balcony overlooking the Blue Ridge Parkway. I’ll never remember how to play it again, which makes it even more of a lost memory caught in time.”

Check out the song below. Kramies is out everywhere on September 9th.