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Think chillwave, or vaporwave—or maybe electric pop. Maybe you don’t know any of those terms, and that’s OK. Hotel Pools can sound like all of them, or none of them. That’s kind of the point of the project for its creator, Ben Braun.
“It’s all that,” Braun says. “It’s whatever you want it to be.”
For Braun, the solo project came from the need to stop pleasing outwardly, and move inward. Braun, now 41, grew up primarily in Oregon, spending his teens creating hip-hop beats before getting to college and connecting with Ian Mackintosh. They formed Mackintosh Braun, an electro-pop group that landed on Island Records, home to artists like Bon Jovi, Jessie Reyez and the music of Bob Marley.
A major label, a song placed in the TV series Riverdale, big tours—for the most part it sounds like a bit of a musical dream, but it didn’t last. “I had spent many years trying to be cool with A&R, trying to bend over backwards for people, hoping it would work out, and we got dropped,” Braun says. “Hotel Pools was really an exercise in me not judging my own music—just doing what I wanted to do, making what I wanted to make.”
From there came Hotel Pools’ 2018 debut, Fall—sun-crisped beats with a strong emphasis on deep rhythms (Braun’s father, Michael Braun, was the longtime touring drummer for Hall & Oates). The lead melodies are simple synth lines that shine through, at times similar to more stretched and sparse moments of Tycho songs. Braun has released eight records under Hotel Pools, not overthinking a minute of the process.
“I’m really just creating and letting it be what it is, and then moving on,” Braun says. “Hotel Pools lives in this beachy, spacey world. Even if it’s cliche, if I like it I’ll do it. It’s a very gut, visceral thing.”
For his upcoming release, Nature, which comes out May 24, Braun has temporarily departed that beachy world for the lush forests of the Pacific Northwest. While most of Hotel Pools’ records have been freeform explorations, this one takes a deeper, more vulnerable dive. Nature is dedicated to Braun’s brother, who died unexpectedly last year. Making the album became a therapeutic space that led Braun into more personal sounds, this time with no drums.
“The emotion comes from the sustain of the note, or the way the reverb trail hangs, things like that that I’m trying to pay more attention to,” Braun says. “It was more emotive for me because it was more stripped back. It felt like me taking my process and removing a ton—here’s a few things, let’s let those shine.”
Those stripped-down sounds became ambient, lush songs, often moving at a slower, dreamier pace. The soundscapes were made with Government Camp in mind, a place Braun and his brother often went as kids. Some of that big mountain sky feel comes through on tracks like “Into the Stars” featuring Russian producer Øneheart, with soft crescendos of synth rising and falling like the streaks of falling stars. These are special songs, ones that Braun let form themselves. Many of the recordings were done on the first take.
These songs may have more of a somber tone than past Hotel Pools, a sound that even Braun himself isn’t used to, but they’re still intuitive—a gathering of cathartic songs coming from somewhere even deeper than gut feeling.
“When I’m making songs, the things that give me goosebumps are different than this record,” Braun says. “It was something I wanted to do for him, and for myself. I’m trying to deal with [the loss] the way I know how. There’s a lot of emotions and things I wish I’d done. Music was a way to make his memory something special for people that care about me, to let them in on something personal to me, and hopefully it can be special to them.”