Samia Bloodless LP

Samia's 2020 debut album, The Baby, marked a confessional coming-of-age —an intimate love letter to those sentiments that are most difficult to articulate. In her 2023 breakout and award-winning record Honey, Samia deepened this exploration of young adulthood, offering a more introspective take as she searched for clarity. These releases, including her 2021 EP Scout, alongside her magnetic live performances, have earned her widespread critical acclaim, over 150 million streams, and a devoted fan base who sing along passionately to every word at sold-out shows. She's also won over new audiences opening for artists like Maggie Rogers, Lucy Dacus, and Courtney Barnett.

For Bloodless, Samia reunited with producers Caleb Wright—of her favorite band, The Happy Children—and Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus, who also happens to be her neighbor in Minneapolis. She recently relocated there after a year in LA, three years in Nashville, and spending her teens and early 20s in New York City. Rounding out the team is Samia's close friend and fellow artist Raffaella, who inspired the song "North Poles." Together they've created a space where Samia can be both vulnerable and challenged.

Recorded in North Carolina and Minneapolis, Bloodless is a richly layered album that shifts seamlessly from sparse folk to sweeping indie-pop epics. Tracks like "Fair Game" explore the duality of oscillating between an idealized and demonized self; fantasizing about fully embodying either. "Sacred" uncovers someone's capacity for love through their hatred.

"It's easier to be what someone wants you to be if you give as little as possible," says Samia. With Bloodless, she seeks comfort in absence, and explores the allure of existing as fantasy. Drawing inspiration from unsolved mysteries – inexplicable cattle mutilations, the presence of God, the impossibility of femininity – Samia examines how shadows can loom larger than their source. "I noticed a pattern in my life of wanting to live up to the person I became in someone's head; you become a lot bigger with distance." Bloodless, which shifts seamlessly from sparse folk to sweeping indie-pop epics, adorned with haunting harmonies and spectral imagery, seeks a path through that space between void and flesh-and-blood presence. Samia would like to be both, to be whole, to be impossible.

She repeats that sentiment – "I want to be impossible" – throughout the chorus of Bloodless' lead single and eerie opening track "Bovine Excision." Inspired by the mysterious phenomenon involving the bloodless surgical removal of cattle organs, "Bovine Excision" finds Samia's voice flowing through evocative lyrics with ease, alongside the gentle strum of a lone acoustic guitar. The quiet intimacy builds into a storm of sound, culminating in Samia's layered, ethereal harmonies that pierce with a haunting, macabre refrain that reveals the album title: "And drained, drained bloodless."

"I was drawn to the phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation as a metaphor for self-extraction – this clinical pursuit of emptiness," Samia explains of "Bovine Excision." These emptied cattle evoke a grotesque vessel that Samia unwittingly nurtured in an attempt to embody something both untouchable and on display, overflowing with infinite, unattainable possibilities and projections. This is just one strand Samia weaves into the intricate tapestry of Bloodless.

Bloodless, Samia's third and best LP, affirms her as a true talent deserving of her place in the firmament of accessible, alt-slanted singer-songwriter music.