QRTR, real name Meagan Rodriguez, has signed with Dome of Doom for the release of her debut album, Drenched.

QRTR started work on Drenched in 2017, carving out new material around DJ sets across the United States and recent gigs in Madeira, Portugal, and she finished it it November 2019, with the majority of the recording sessions occurring at her home-studio in Brooklyn, New York. It follows her Absinthe Party EP, released in 2017, and features Dome of Doom label-mate Blake Skowron.

The album is described as a “love song” to the ocean’s depths. QRTR’s father was born in Puerto Rico and her mother in Madeira, a Portuguese island off the coast of Morocco. “Waves and dance music have a lot in common, the way they provide release through repetition,” QRTR continues. “In Madeira, the people have an intimate relationship with the ocean, one of both respect and fear. The island is mountainous, with rocky beaches along the sides of cliffs. It beckons you, and when you’ve succumbed, the high tide comes in and pushes you back out.”

Influences behind it include QRTR’s love for reading, in particular the work of Haruki Murakami and the New Yorker‘s Jia Tolentino, and also a growing interest in space. “There is a YouTube video of sounds recorded by the NASA Voyager passing by Jupiter,” she explains. “You can hear the vibrations of electromagnetic particles being slammed by solar winds. It’s haunting and beautiful and I listened to it a hundred times over the course of writing Drenched, wondering how I could make people feel the way those sounds made me feel.”

Across the album, QRTR infuses film library material she has collected during film school and also her own vocal recordings, “making it a really unique house record,” the label explains.

The artwork was completed by Matthew Beck and depicts the environment of the record, with the album title sinking into a wave of pinks and blues, struggling to stay afloat.

On mastering duties was renowned engineer Jamie Myerson, whose work became an integral component to the album’s completion and design.

Tracklisting

01. I Gave Up
02. All Of My
03. Little Pills (feat. Blake Skowron)
04. And Still (Interlude)
05. You Won’t Return (Nunca)
06. My Calls
07. My Bad (I See)
08. A Sunday Morning Meditation (feat. ambientkitty)

Drenched LP drops worldwide on March 20 on streaming platforms and limited edition cassette. Pre-order is available here, and the first single, “I Gave Up,” will drop on February 28.