Singer/Songwriter Dom Cotton Drops Debut Single

When it comes to making an ambitious songcraft sound relatively streamlined and accessible to any listener, you could say that rookie recording artist Dom Cotton has a leg up on most of his competition.

His debut single, “Get Me Outta Here,” doesn’t pull punches when it comes to aesthetical hybridity. Rather than leaning on a hook for all of the harmonic action here, Cotton is getting knee-deep in melodicism from the jump, and exerting a lot of energy getting to the climax of this song without ever sounding winded or disconnected with the adrenaline of the instrumentation. The swing is hard – exceptionally hard if you’re not anticipating the punch of this well-mastered mix – but it’s entirely necessary to drive home the enthusiasm my boy is putting into every one of these verses. He’s got a lot of charisma that is impossible to soften or water down in any capacity in “Get Me Outta Here,” and whether we’re watching the music video in which he stars or just listening to the track on its own, there’s really no walking away from this piece without having some respect for what (and how) its creator has been developing lately. 

There’s a lot of ambition behind this groove, but I think that if there wasn’t quite as much oomph in the percussion, we wouldn’t be getting as much drive out of Cotton, either. He seems motivated by the pressurized place his vocal has in the mix, as though he’s more productive when the tension is coming down on him in an arrangement as opposed to leading the pack at the front of the stage – perfectly alright in my opinion, so long as his melodic wit doesn’t change at all in his future recordings.

Rookie releases are what tends to set the pace for the entire first half of a career in this medium, but it’s more than a little clear to me that Dom Cotton isn’t breaking off more than he can chew for this performance of “Get Me Outta Here” at all. Instead, he’s letting lofty dreams lend their vision to the structure of this track, utilizing a thoughtful mixing style and showing us that experimentation is not going to be off the table for his future at all. 

“Get Me Outta Here” is a fun song and one that I think just about anyone who loves hard swing and a sexy lead vocal should pick up this September, but it’s also one of the best pop debuts I’ve had the pleasure of reviewing in the past month. There’s a lot of promise in Dom Cotton, and as long as he steers clear of indulgences that his peers are addicted to in the studio and pursues an experimental path with the skills he’s working with at the moment, I think he’s going to see a lot of success in the years to come. This is, after all, a seller’s market for the qualified pop musician in 2021, and Cotton has all the qualifications a discriminating fan like me is looking for.

Mindy McCall