FEATURE: Spotlight: Revisited: Samia

FEATURE:

Spotlight: Revisited

PHOTO CREDIT: Sawyer Brice

Samia

__________

HAVING recently…

stopped off in the U.K. for some dates, the brilliant Los Angeles-born Samia is someone I want to revisit. Initially including her in Spotlight in 2022. As she has released two studio albums since then, I thought it was worth coming back. Her news album, Bloodless, was released on 25th April. It is one of the most acclaimed albums of the year. I am going to end with a couple of reviews for that album. Before that, I will feature some interviews with this phenomenal artist. I am going to start off with an interview from i-D. They write about an artist who imagines “herself as a canvas for other people’s projections”:

“The first time I met Samia Finnerty––that’s her government name––she was with an old actor boyfriend in London in 2017. We were taking photos of him, while she spent time, perfectly pleasantly, on the periphery. We maybe exchanged niceties but I didn’t know who she was beyond, well, being His Girlfriend. Then several years later, she wrote one of my favourite debut records: a piercing and anxious piece of work about the need to be coddled in fear of falling apart. It was called The Baby. I spoke to her about it at the time, and remember, most of all, that she rejected the idea of her songs belonging on ‘Badass Women’ Spotify playlists. “I don’t often write from a place of empowerment,” she said, 23 and already very smart. “Usually, when I’m writing it’s from a place of desperation.”

On 2023’s Honey, critics caught up (The Guardian: “raw, deliciously sad, five stars”). It was an album that opened with a lethal acoustic offering “Kill Her Freak Out,” about watching an old flame meet someone new, and hating the prospect so much that you want to “fucking kill her” and “fucking freak out.” The album was a hit, as far as indie records go, carrying a kind of unexpected buoyancy to balance out its lyrical melancholy. But after it was out there, Samia’s proverbial shit hit the fan. “Everyone warned me about second albums, and I didn’t obviously want to believe it, but it was tough,” she says. The good thing? “It ended up giving me a little bit of a metamorphosis.”
When Samia gets into a pit of depression, she temporarily becomes a new person. After the whirlwind of Honey hit hard, “I developed this really spontaneous, sort of like open minded, reckless personality.” She started saying yes to hanging with strangers, took four-hour flights to rural forests for friends’ birthdays, whereas before, she would have stayed at home. “I went swimming a lot. In, like, bodies of water.” That inspired a lyric on “Bovine Excision,” the album’s lead single, which hearkens back to moments spent “picking leeches off white underwear.”
She had tested out living in Los Angeles, where she was born, after spending time in New York and Nashville, but found the city too steered by the music industry. “There are people who make LA feel like living out the back of a truck somewhere,” she says. But she knew she wasn’t one of them. So Minneapolis came calling, where many of her friends and collaborators lived, and she found it to be a “wellspring for song stuff.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Sawyer Brice

“My instinct is full-on bridge troll, Rumpelstiltskin, riddles and rhymes, you know?”

samia on writing lyrics

Like The Baby, Bloodless started with poems that she’d take to the piano and try to figure out the melodies for, helped by her allies in life and music, the artist Raffaella, Caleb Wright, and Jake Luppen of the indie rock group Hippo Campus. She has worked with other songwriters and producers before, but “I was sitting on their couch, worried about the clock ticking, so I didn’t write what I wanted to,” she says. This trio knew her well enough to call out her bullshit with her lyrics; telling her when the surgical, somewhat submissive energy of the music, these grandiose reckonings with a higher power, had slathered itself too thickly over the songs. “My instinct is full-on bridge troll, Rumpelstiltskin, riddles and rhymes, you know?” Samia says, laughing. “And I wouldn’t want to lose that, because I know it’s true to me––but between the three of them, they can be like: we can find another word there that people know and use.”
The “unsolved mysteries” that make up the tapestry of Bloodless started to make sense to Samia when she wrote “Proof,” about a year after Honey had come out. On the record, it’s maybe the most conventional Samia song: acoustic guitar and her voice, speaking words simultaneously fatalistic––“The girls bleed and drape over the recliner”––and almost comically plain, the constant refrain of “You don’t know me, bitch.”
The album is laden with gorgeous, enduringly colourful takes on standard singer-songwriter self reflections like this––simultaneously profound and disarmingly simple. On “Pants,” the video for which features The White Lotus star Fred Hechinger dancing in a tent, Samia contemplates the time spent trying on a different personality through the trousers she wears on a flight. “Who was I when I bought these pants?” she questions, following it up with the quip: “They’re non refundable”.
It’s music for the feral, for the nuisances. For the type of person who’s willing to embarrass themselves. It also––despite cutting through its big questions with wistful, loose-living imagery: think drinking piss, flirting with the idea of ruining parties, and Lime-flavoured Lays––feels like the work of a grown up.

Samia thinks that’s a new-found confidence. “I’ve always had this problem where I won’t say anything with my chest unless it could be argued in a court of law,” she says. Her songs have gotten her in trouble with her subjects in the past; at least that way she knew she was right. “I play the tape all the way through, [getting] everyone’s perspective. But on this record, I was like, I don’t know if that’s the best thing for art, you know?” So she just said it this time. “There’s a really crazy, almost surprising theme of acceptance and acquiescence on this album that I didn’t see coming”.

PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez

I am going to move to a fascinating and illuminating interview from The Line of Best Fit that was published in April. Having followed her music for years now, I can see how she has evolved. One of the most remarkable songwriters in the world. A sound that is so distinct. Bloodless is an album that Under the Radar said was “angrier, stranger, and more ambitious—less a diary and more a myth, refracted through elliptical metaphors, religious allusions, and a theatrical distance that skilfully enhances the album's raw intimacy”:

“For Finnerty, songwriting has always been a form of therapy. “I started writing because I was angsty and upset as a pre-teen. It was a puberty outlet, and that’s how I learned to process my feelings,” she explains. That tone earned her a cult following and critical acclaim. Audiences came to love her cutting, honest, and masterful vignettes. Her debut, The Baby, now sits in the indie coming-of-age canon; the follow up, Honey, a formidable companion. But if those first two records saw an adolescent become an adult, Bloodless sees an adult become themself.

“I was thinking about a tendency I had to try to make myself incredibly small, or to give as little information about myself as possible so that I could become whatever someone else wanted to project onto me,” Finnerty says. This album was born of trying to unpack and unlearn that tendency, one she says she’s carried most of her life. “I tried to sustain an existence as an idea. Whether that be their dream girl or their worst nightmare, I would just be whatever anyone wanted me to be at all times. And I was like: That’s gotta stop. It’s good for connection. It doesn’t foster real relationships.”

Album-mode for Finnerty is all encompassing. She’s the type, she says, to pull her hair out over every word, flicking through each song line by line to make sure she’s saying exactly what she means at every turn. Early on in the Bloodless process, she adopted an intensive writing routine, treating it like a nine-to-five and not allowing herself to stop writing until the end of her workday. Every day, for a month, she’d sit down for hours on end and not let herself stop. “It was pretty torturous, but I think it actually helped a lot,” she says. “I’d do it again.”

Her supplementary reading diet – in addition to Butler – included Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Roxanne Gay, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Andrea Dworkin. She searched their texts like scriptures, explaining her journey as an endless seeking that she thought might make her feel whole. I follow up on this and ask if she’s religious at all – the album’s spiritual and metaphysical otherworldly underpinnings might lend themselves to theological interpretation. I wonder also about this connection she’s described wanting with some greater purpose or path or meaning. She shakes her head no. She reiterates: “But, I’m a seeker.”

PHOTO CREDIT: Shervin Lainez

Bloodless itself oscillates between emptiness and completeness. If “North Poles” is two halves joining together in a chaotically perfect union, “Hole In A Frame” is its foil, exploring what’s left when there isn’t even a singular whole but a celebrated lack thereof. Inspired by a framed hole that Sid Vicious punched in the wall of Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Finnerty mythologizes emptiness. Or, more accurately, riffs off a famously already-immortalised emptiness. “When I was trying to write about being complicit in my own emptiness and trying to be as barely there as possible, I was like: Oh, I feel like a framed whole. A framed absence. It’s like a celebrated thing that’s gone,” she says. The song was the last track she wrote for the record, and it’s maybe the most complete articulation of the concepts she was trying to parse through at the time.

“I think with this album, I tried to let myself be angry,” Finnerty continues. To date, much of her catalogue has leaned unfettered into sadness, making her a standard bearer for the somewhat patronisingly-titled ‘sad girl’ genre. Sadness, especially for women, is often more palatable, easier to accept for listeners and critics. But writing anger – allowing yourself to feel it – requires coming to the table from a place of strength, one that’s often harder to tap into and one that’s also often discouraged. Bloodless, for Finnerty, was about unshackling herself from those ideological chains.

“I have this thing where I won’t get angry unless it could be justified in a court of law,” she tells me. “I go through the whole thing in my brain and I measure everyone else’s opinions and I won’t open my mouth until I’m absolutely certain I’m right. But with this one, I tried to let some things fly. And I listened to a lot of Fiona Apple, so that helps.”

In the end, after grappling with it all, she arrived at acceptance. The record’s closer, “Pants,” isn’t some triumphant overcoming but instead a higher form of self-understanding. This, Finnerty tells me, proved to be all she really needed in the first place. “I’m always going to be a little bit all of these behaviours,” she says. “I think all you can really do is look at it and try to have awareness.”

As she wrote, Luppen helped her bring her visions to life in studios across Minnesota and North Carolina. In Minnesota, their space was set up in a distillery, which Finnerty says gave her a constant headache that helped motivate her to actually finish the record. She’s the type, she tells me, to spend months tweaking, often coming back to songs months later when she’s finally processed the events they’re about. While this gives her writing expansive perspective, it’s not always helpful for knowing when to put the pen down. That’s where the alcohol-smell-induced daze stepped in. Intermixed with those sessions were trips down to North Carolina, where Wright recently moved with his family. There, they stayed a Betty’s, a studio space built by Sylvan Esso in the woods near Chapel Hill.

“I think we really figured out what the album was in North Carolina,” she says of one of the early pilgrimages out there for Bloodless. “We did a bunch of mushrooms and figured out the North Star.”

Sonically, Bloodless escapes genre. For every finger-picked guitar there’s a whirring synth, autotuned vocal embellishment, or blissed-out drum. If there’s any production throughline, Finnerty tells me, it would just be “eerie.”

“I hate genres,” Finnerty says. “It feels really restrictive. So, I like trying to push that a bit. And working with Jake and Caleb, their palettes are so complicated and even contradict each other, so it’s fun to see what that creates”.

Before getting to some reviews, there is an interview from Rolling Stone where they note how she “searched for her true self, shook off sexist expectations — and made her boldest album yet”. Bloodless is a truly remarkable album. If you have never heard Samia and are not sure whether to commit or not, there are few artists I rate as highlight. Someone I was really keen to return to for this Spotlight: Revisited:

“For Bloodless, Samia realized she had to turn away from the need for outside approval. “It doesn’t come naturally for me. I’m not one of those people who’s like, ‘Fuck what you think,’” she says. “I was really on a mission to shed that part of myself, because I thought, ‘The only way I’ll ever be happy is if I learn to believe in my choices and ideas.’”

Since this past December, Samia has lived in Minneapolis with her boyfriend and fellow musician Briston Maroney. Before that, the couple spent time in Los Angeles, where she was born to actor parents Kathy Najimy and Dan Finnerty, and in Nashville, where Maroney was based. But she says the new album’s Americana feel and folk-pop leanings came into focus on a pivotal recording trip that she took in August 2023 to western North Carolina. “I think the spirit of it was born there,” she says. “That’s when I sort of understood what I was trying to say.”

Samia had begun formulating the poems that would become Bloodless earlier that year, starting with a concept revolving around historical muses like Kiki de Montparnasse, an early-20th-century artist’s model for surrealist painter Man Ray and others. But she found herself changing course to write about how she, herself, was perceived by the world.

It started with the party Samia sings about on “Lizard” — a night that was ruined by the presence of a “no-contact person in my life,” she says. “We had a conversation to try to remedy the situation, and the next day, we had to go to a party together with all of our mutual friends, mostly his friends, and it was horrible.”

Samia says that painful encounter helped her tap into one of the new album’s central themes. “When you don’t talk things through, there’s just a lot of fantasy being created,” she says. “I was feeling the consequences of being made into a fantasy and not being able to have a chance to explain myself and be a human being.” She felt like a mythologized monster, and it pissed her off

Samia soon realized her frustration extended beyond that specific conflict. “I started thinking about my experience with womanhood on a larger scale,” she says. “I had so much shame about being worried about men and maybe having altered myself in some way because of it.”

That’s a theme she’s been working through for years: Some of her earliest singles, like “Someone Tell the Boys” and “Lasting Friend,” boldly called out mansplainers and handsy young men, cementing the singer-songwriter as a feminist voice.

As she continued writing Bloodless, Samia saw how universal her feelings were, and how often women have to shape and contort themselves to appease men. “Even if you don’t like boys, you just have to make men not kill you,” she says. “You have to appeal to men in some way.” Samia makes sure to clarify that she’s not talking about one man in her life: “I keep calling it this conglomerate, patchwork, abstract idea of a man.”

Throughout the LP, Samia deals with the horrific realities of a patriarchal society by poking fun at the unattainable expectations put on women. “Picking leeches off white underwear … I want to be impossible,” she sings on the lead single, “Bovine Excision,” subverting the idea of virginity by claiming she’s so incredibly, unrealistically pure that even leeches sucking on her skin wouldn’t draw a drop of blood.

On album highlight “Hole in a Frame,” Samia finds there can be power in being an empty vessel for other people’s ideas of what you represent, using a piece of music history as a metaphor: the framed spot in Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Sid Vicious punched a hole in the wall in 1978. “It was just the most perfect fucking metaphor … the frame around nothing,” she says. “It was this absence that he created.”

The six-minute spiral of an album closer, “Pants,” explores a similar idea as Samia contends with her identity. “Who was I when I bought these pants?/They’re nonrefundable/Now I’m questioning everything I am,” she sings breathlessly over a steady drumbeat before the track transforms into a moody meditation. “Wanna see what’s under these Levi’s?/I got nothing under these Levi’s,” Samia repeatedly taunts as the song ends. Get it? “There’s no woman under the pants,” she tells me, laughing”.

I will come to a couple of the positive reviews for Bloodless. NME. There is a lot to love about this breathtaking album. I think the lyrics are the standout. Nobody writes like Samia. This is an artist that is going to continue to release these year-best albums. There is no doubting the brilliance of Bloodless:

“Since the release of her debut album ‘The Baby’ in 2020, Samia has become known as a songwriter with a knack for the diaristic and the vulnerable; an artist who is profoundly relatable by being highly personal, distilling the complexities of young womanhood into lines that sear. Second record ‘Honey’, released in 2023, only reinforced that notion, infusing more dark humour into songs full of pain and poignancy.

On ‘Bloodless’, she takes all that and applies it to her loftiest topics yet – the idea of the dream woman as an unsolved mystery, whether our true selves are just a social construct and the emptiness that’s left when you remove all the experiences that have shaped you, how she’s constructed herself in response to what she thinks men want. Those all combine on opener ‘Bovine Excision’, Samia desiring to be “drained bloodless” like the titular unexplained phenomenon of cattle being found mutilated, but not one drop of blood spilt; an urge to remove everything but remain inscrutable.

At the opposite end of the record, she uses a pair of jeans to dissect who she is now, who she once was and who, beneath it all, she really is. “Who was I when I bought these pants?” she ponders. “They’re non-refundable / Now I’m questioning everything I am.” Later, she reveals her conclusion over discordant twangs: “Wanna see what’s under these Levi’s? / I got nothing under these Levi’s.” It’s not a flirty come-on, but a concession that, perhaps, the idea of a true self doesn’t really exist.

“You don’t know me, bitch,” she sings just above a whisper on ‘Proof’, but ‘Bloodless’ at least gives us glimpses at Samia as she dismantles her character song-by-song. On the whirring ‘Lizard’, she fights the urge to be destructive and cause a scene; ‘Craziest Person’ finds her seeking out those messier than her so she can look better. And on ‘Fair Game’, she’s dazzling – a firefly with “no shortage of brilliance / If you can catch me in a clear cup”.

‘Bloodless’ doesn’t just signal huge growth in Samia’s lyrics, but in her music too. It’s an album that’s grand, warm and rich, whether in its most stripped-back, stark songs – like ‘Proof’, which features just the 28-year-old’s voice and a finger-picked guitar – or the thundering eruption of ‘Carousel’ that borders on claustrophobic. It’s also stuffed with ideas. ‘Pants’ could be three different songs, morphing from melancholy indie-rock atmospherics to experimental fragments to a shuffling, Americana outro.

With all that going on, it would be easy for the album to collapse under its own weight; its ambitions proving to be its own downfall. Impressively, though, Samia sorts ‘Bloodless’ into something that not only keeps it together but thrives on its complexities and intricacies. We already knew Samia was a sublime songwriter, but on her third album, she sets a new bar – and then some”.

I am going to finish off with a review from DIY. I am so excited to see how her career blossoms. When I first heard her several years ago, I knew that Samia is an artist we’d be talking about for many more to come. That definitely seems to be the case. Bloodless is an album you will listen to but be compelled to listen to and over and over:

“A delayed shuffle kicks in after the first chorus of ‘Bovine Excision’, the opening track of Samia’s third album ‘Bloodless.’ A simultaneous guitar stab and drum hit highlights the drum’s previous absence, and - akin to the first verse of its opener - ‘Bloodless’ finds comfort in absence, whether it’s referencing cattle mutilation or Sid Vicious’ framed fist print in ‘Hole in a Frame’. Seemingly, Samia has never been one to shy away from a complex theme or a darkly- outlined metaphor: her 2023 breakout and award-winning record ‘Honey’ touched on themes of nihilism and murder. Sharp, vivid songwriting is central to Samia’s craft, and with ‘Bloodless’, her superpower lies in her curiosity for the unknown, and an ability to turn herself inside out, facing the raw, uncomfortable, and deeply human parts of herself head on.

On ‘Lizard’, she compares the likes of men and God and how both are bolstered by uncritical acceptance, noting “peace is a double-locked door, I’m the whore with the extra key”. Then, turning love into indifference like the flip of a switch, ‘Sacred’ concisely describes the emotional whiplash of a breakup (“you never loved me like you hate me now”). In terms of production, the album mostly takes a no-frills approach, often just vocal and acoustic guitar lending itself to the album’s overall message; if you give less of yourself, you’ll appear bigger. Consequently, Samia’s words have never been so profound”.

Go and follow Samia. Listen to Bloodless and revisit 2023’s Honey and 2020’s The Baby. I hope that Samia comes back to the U.K. soon and plays some more dates. I really love her music and would recommend it to everyone. If you do not know about her yet then go and check her out. An artist who is going to be putting out wonderful albums for years to come. A hearty and impassioned salute to…