released March 6, 2018

Words/music by Mark Kramer
Produced/mixed/mastered by Nick Layman
Recorded at Goldsmith Studios in Louisville,KY
Cover design by Lacey Guthrie
Recorded under the influence of Shirley Horn and Julien Baker

Special thanks:
CJ Boyd
Nick Layman
Lacey Guthrie
Sean Padilla
Alix Bossenger
Tim Anderl
Joe Anderl/The 1984 Draft
Mike Seymour
Sid Bishop
Never Nervous
Ghettoblaster Magazine
You

Nocturnal reveries in the vein of minimal Radiohead compositions. Mark Kramer has cultivated a distinctive singer/songwriter style, a black, evocative character, preferring the shadows to the light. His voice haunts the spare guitar notes like an utter specter. Songs like these play over the end credits of drama films that have faded to black following some sort of traumatic event.
The Tender Mercy tape is packaged beautifully in folded cardstock, like an invitation to some midnight affair or strange ritual. Accept it, know that it’s your destiny, and arrive promptly at the given hour. Your life may depend on it.
-Cassette Gods/Ryan Masteller

As is often the case with interesting new music, Tender Mercy (aka Louisville’s singer/songwriter Mark Kramer) is the kind of project that doesn’t bother to apologize for not fitting neatly into a box. While the name may conjure an image of a Christian rock/metal band, the religious aspect mostly comes out in the form of trance-like atmosphere of live performances – cosmic gospel for a new age.
To push the gospel analogy further, much of TM’s music is unapologetically bleak/dark (to wit – Fear, War and Disaster are just few of the titles on Leave Little Room, project’s latest). As Kramer explains in an interview with Leo Weekly:

"What I do seems to alienate most people. It’s on the dissonant side of quiet, ‘depressing’ music, which is a hard sell. People don’t like being made to feel that way."

While its true that Tender Mercy’s music is not for everyone, those that grew up on a steady diet of Kranky, Red House Painters and Low’s output will have plenty of reasons to sink their teeth into TM’s back catalog (liner notes on Leave Little Room also mention the influence of Shirley Horn and Julien Baker).
- I Heart Noise/Ilya Sitnikov

Even after more than twenty years from the wonderful season that has seen the epicenter of a peculiar post-rock declination, Louisville, Kentucky, does not cease to be a melting pot of authentically outsider music, for style and, above all, for slowed down times. There he established Mark Kramer after years of playing in the post-punk band of the Midwest, evidently looking for a quiet corner in which to develop the intimate and compassionate songwriting proposed under the alias Tender Mercy in four Ep in the last seven years and now for the first time in a real album.
"Leave Little Room" contains ten narcoleptic twilight songs, punctuated by the evocative lyricism of Kramer's interpretations, softly resting on prolonged resonances of notes, which create an ambiance of suffused intimism. Even if they are characterized by an ambivalent atmosphere and a confessional tone, Kramer's pieces are kept far from the registers of a "bedroom" self-referential spleen but, just like the title of the work, they emerge from the environment in which they were created to find a emotional empathy through their impalpable slow-motion harmonies.
It is moderately dark slow-core and close to a zero degree of writing and interpretation that of the artist who in Louisville has evidently found the ideal context to deploy his reflective songwriting, which can not warm hearts accustomed to being caressed by slowness and poetry.
-Music Won't Save You/Raffaello Russo

Tender Mercy, the solo project of singer-songwriter and guitarist Mark Kramer, walks a tightrope between not quite enough and Goldilocks Zone perfection. There is a quiet seething to his music that recalls Low or Talk Talk, a coiled tension that’s buried in the melancholia. More straightforward than the last Tender Mercy record, 2016’s experimental It Was You, and warmer than the 2015 release Sacred Sphinx, Leave Little Room continues an evolution to sonic purity. Tender Mercy’s high points are meditations on ambience, a slow-motion unraveling of his soul, and Kramer’s greatest asset is the earnestness and vulnerability in his delivery.
-LEO Weekly/Syd Bishop

People who know me think I’m a pretty laid back guy, but lately that’s not really the case. I’ve been having anxiety dreams for the past two months that wake me up every 1.5 hours. So every now and again, I have to make time for myself to chill the fuck out. Anytime a new Tender Mercy track comes out, I’m able to find that time. Luckily for me, Leave Little Room is not just a track, and not another short EP, — this is a complete album full of chill jams.
Leave Little Room is not a huge stretch from former Tender Mercy releases like the highly recommended It Was You and Sacred Sphinx. Each of these albums feel like a daydream or trance in which a fantastic beast (or Mark Kramer?) comes out of the woods and guides you down a dirt path to a creek where the fairies and unicorns hang out. Once there, you can finally relax and enjoy the space provided.
The most astonishing thing about the meditation that Tender Mercy provides is that nothing is rushed. You’re given plenty of time to enjoy each note for what it is. Almost nothing else in 2018 is treated that way; that’s why Leave Little Room is a must listen for your health.
-Never Nervous/Jake Hellman