Dota

Beautiful is: it could just as well be DOTA’s very first record. You don’t miss anything you love about Dota — and yet, the music feels even more minimalistic, more bouncy — grown-ups might call it more contrasty. The lyrics cut even deeper into the heart of darkness, searching with even more devotion, and finding a new kind of clarity even in uncertainty.
Perhaps that’s also the result of her deep engagement with the poetry of Mascha Kaléko, to whom she’s dedicated two musical albums over the past three years.

DOTA — written in all caps for good reason — is more than just the lyrical self of Dota Kehr. It stands for the creative community around her, the band that has shaped her sound for years: guitarist Jan Rohrbach, drummer Janis Görlich, keyboardist Patrick Reising, and bassist Alexander Binder. Together with them, Dota arranges and records her songs. Together, they write the DOTA formula on the chalkboard:
Every word means at least its opposite, question marks everywhere, exclamation points rarely.

The first single, „Einfach zu abgelenkt“ (Too easily distracted), plays the DOTA game to perfection. The guitar lounges by the lake in summer, the synth shimmers, the drums dance in stop-and-go rhythms. Dota sings like she’s got somewhere else to be — about how she can’t commit, and neither can anyone else. ADHD as a social diagnosis.

In „Kettenkarussell“ (Chain Carousel) — one of those songs only DOTA can pull off, relaxed and tense at once, like a thoughtful bouncy ball — she sings:
“Time to start spinning around something else / That’s fine, I can’t stand the everyday.”
And the band grooves along, propelling her voice forward as if to say: “Just one more ride.”

Question: What should songwriters even sing about these days?
Next question: What are “these days,” anyway?

Dota asked herself those same questions while preparing her new album. The answers seem to lie along the way, like road signs appearing whenever the work gets serious.

It has always taken just three things: eyes wide open, a voice that’s truly your own, and a heart big enough for more than your retirement plan.
Dota knows who she is — and she sees the things that connect her to the world she lives in, as well as the ones that separate her from it.
Things that give her hope, and things that repel her — and she meets them in her songs with honesty (Das wogende Meer) or biting irony (Milliardäre).