Forging her own roadmap to success, the new EP from LA-based musician Samara Cyn steers her further into uncharted territory. She meets writer Douglas Jardim to talk slam poetry roots, freestyle fame, and rewriting the rules of the rap game.
“I don’t feel scared to talk to new people,” Samara Cyn, new kid on the neo soul block, announces over Zoom. Originally hailing from Murfreesboro, Tennessee, the LA-based singer and rapper owns this confidence as the child of an army family always on the move. Having spent most of her life living state to state – Georgia, Texas, Hawaii, you name it – with her military father and English teacher mother, taking the wheel has become second nature. “I always say as a human being it made me a lot more open minded, it really helped shape my delivery. I feel like I can read people very well, and I know how to communicate with them in a way that they can receive it.”
Interacting with different communities affected Cyn’s ability to connect with people, to be sensitive and understanding of their experiences, from a young age. Commanding sharp, plentiful bars that tackle the existential dilemmas of the world and the self, it’s easy to see why her assured craft has already resonated with so many listeners far and wide through the States. Her voice crooning over slick jazz instrumentations, you may recognise Cyn from her “Chrome” COLORS performance, or her viral 2024 “green eyes freestyle”, which earned her a Erykah Badu co-sign. “I had no idea my freestyles were going to be as prominent in my journey as they have been,” the 27-year-old wordsmith expresses, casually, as though years of slam poetry training had escaped her. “I wrote my first slam poem when I was in the fifth grade. Putting it to music never clicked to me until I was already in college and I wrote my first song.”
What started off as a hobby quickly became a calling for young Samara. Watching her mother’s poetry lessons was formative, “It’s so many different things,” she says. “We know that there’s not just freaking Edgar Allen Poe, we understand that Tupac was poetry as well.” Brave New Voices – a youth spoken word festival in the US – opened up her eyes to a breadth of opportunity. “These inner city kids are talking about their experiences and it’s very powerful, the cadence and the intention of even performing with another person. I was mesmerised, it made me want to talk about stuff with substance.”
Then came Poetic Soul, an open mic night that still happens every Wednesday in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s here where Cyn would sign-up early at CasaMoreno Night Club to hone the skills that define her as an artist today, perfecting her poetry while learning how to communicate with a live band on stage. “There were times where I was so fucking nervous about being in front of a crowd,” she shares. “But there were also these freeing moments, I’d get through something that was really personal, and everybody in the room would stand up and clap. Experiencing that felt like a superpower.”
As bookings grew, Cyn set her sights for the Hills. She first started making music in 2019, and in October 2024 her debut EP “The Drive Home” dropped to rave reviews. Since then, she’s racked up almost one million monthly listeners on Spotify alone. She’s opened for Nas at the Royal Albert Hall and, in March, she shared the stage with Lauryn Hill and Doechii at Miami’s Jazz in the Gardens music festival. Rap and hip hop were the foundation of what she was consuming in her household, but there was also island music, soul, rock, country. “I want to genre-bend instead of having a really specific sound,” she says. “I don’t feel like I’m only going to be on hip hop production forever, I’ve displayed that I think in “The Drive Home” and “backroads”.”
Cyn’s mission for her new project was to traverse familiar terrain, joining forces with a circle of producers to spark a brighter, more buoyant blend of sounds: upbeat intro “summer’s turning”, “pop n olive” with Sherwyn, “hardheaded”. Tunes like “bad brain” and “brand new teeth” with Smino are very much in her wheelhouse, warm but serious and heavy, sonically and lyrically, discussing personal battles with anxiety.
The title of the EP is a play on society taking the back roads instead of confronting issues straight on, how we’d rather go around and around them without ever actually figuring out a solution. “It’s hypernormalisation,” she declares: a state of delusion to the comfortable ignorance of agony and tragedy happening in the world, due in large part to social media. “It was happening very much so in the States, I was seeing it at the time with a lot of natural disasters. Just the agony and tragedy that’s going on, and how it’s not on our timelines anymore because it got washed off. I tried to dive into this with, ‘How is there hypernormalisation in my life as an individual and as a person?’”
But global doom and gloom aside, Cyn has every reason to be sitting on top of the world like the cartoon in her cover art suggests. In between support for Smino on his Kountry Kousins Tour and nailing her Third Eye Lazy clothing brand, she recently joined the coveted XXL Freshman hall of fame – Megan Thee Stallion, Latto, GloRilla – as the only female artist on 2025’s emerging rap talent list. “I was pretty disappointed that I was the only woman there, I told the people at XXL that I felt this way,” she says. “It was a really cool experience overall. I did feel a lot of anxiety going in to the cypher, and while it felt like an honour, I didn’t think it made sense, to be honest. Bktherula, she would have crushed it. Molly Santana, Lexa Gates. A lot of women are coming in with a similar type of swagger, I don’t feel alone in how I’m showing up.”
Her compass firmly fixed on the future, Samara Cyn is no longer just staking her claim among the greats, she’s reshaping what the landscape looks like altogether, no matter the roadblocks. “People like shit that’s raw and authentic, the pot is opening up to where there’s not one silhouette in rap music or neo soul. I think following your purpose is fulfilling, and I think that’s why we’re supposed to be here.” Through “backroads”, she intersects introspection and outside pressures to construct an experience that’s both intimate and limitless, a style that’s already unmistakably her own. Fasten your seatbelts, we’re in it for the long haul.
Listen to “backroads”…
Photography – Savanna Ruedy
Words – Douglas Jardim
