Meet the lyrical knockout turning songs into cinema.
“I pulled out my hair, cried a lot and slept very little,”says 28-year-old singer-songwriter Samia, her elfin face framed by a waterfall of cascading brunette curls. She’s telling us about the demanding creative process—a year and a half in the making—behind her highly-anticipated upcoming third album, Bloodless, the follow-up to her dewy award-winning second album, Honey. So how did she get out the other side?“I had to try and stop caring what people think.”
We’re speaking to her from Minneapolis, where she’s busy bingeing the new season of Severance, whose gloriously weird storylines are as divinely abstract as the inspiration behind her new album. “It comes from the mythology around bovine excision—farmers allegedly finding their animals drained of blood and mutilated with surgical precision—that became a metaphor for self-extraction and wanting to exist as an idea. It also came from a curiosity about the concept of purity and a cultural obsession with murdered women. I ended upaccidentally writing about blood loss over and over.”
Known for her deft ability to vocalise feelings too difficult to articulate within the limits of language (check out “Kill Her Freak Out”, “BigWheel” and “Is There Something in the Movies”),she creates worlds that feel like Sofia Coppola films rather than stand-alone tracks. “It’s easy to write when there’s something you can’t say to someone’s face,” she lets on. “I try to write the music that I want to hear.” Does that ever get her in trouble? “I wrote pretty elliptically on this one so the catharsis feels private…There’s always a way to say it without saying it.” She pauses. “Except when I say [the lyric], “‘Jack off to someone who’s pregnant…’”
A quick scroll through the YouTube comments of Bloodless’ title-track leads you down a rabbit hole of unwavering praise. “Wow, this is so sweet,” she replies, after we reel off fan-snippets applauding her cinematic lyrics, which start off as poems before she shapes them into Indie-Rock melodies. “I want to find the exact right words to communicate a feeling—that’s been the greatest giftI’ve gotten from other writers. If I could pass that onI’d feel totally fulfilled,” she smiles.
Raised by her parents on an intravenous diet of Stephen Sondheim’s greatest compositions, it washer 6th grade teacher, she explains, who then turned her musical capability to poetry. Something she attributes to“truly finding my voice.” But it’s on Bloodless where Samia realises her artistry, immeasurably—she’s more limitless than ever.
Photography by TianZheng Yun
Styling by Jamie Ortega
Words by Ella Bardsley
Hair & Make-up by Abby Berni at Art Department
Fashion Assistant Amer Macarambon