A week before her album release, the indie rock artist hosted fans at a New York City studio to hear it early.
I always love Samia’s music. Whether I’m blasting “Charm You” in my noise cancelling AirPods or streaming “Kill Her Freak Out” through the old wired headphones that can’t hide an impromptu backing track of a passing train or outside chatter; whether “Show Up” is playing from my shitty phone speaker or “Amelia” radiates through a Sonos sound system. But hearing it like this — in a recording studio — was certainly a special treat.
Surrounded by 30 fans who, Samia acknowledged, didn’t know what they were here for, I sat cross legged on a red Persian-style rug and cream floor pillows. Above me, the slanted wooden ceiling added a cosy cabin feel to the space, offsetting the high-tech equipment imbedded around us — mics picking up our applause, speakers softly playing the artist’s forthcoming album, instruments in every corner, and a control room straight out of Daisy Jones and the Six.
Samia Finnerty, the indie rock singer-songwriter known mononymously, is releasing her third studio album next week, and has spent the past several days running around New York for promo. The follow up to The Baby (2020) and Honey (2023), Bloodless is an exploration of the entanglement between her true self and the versions created to impress others, confronting her tendency to become the alluring, transcendent fantasy of a male gaze over her real, tactile human form. “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,” she explains.
Throughout the album, she discusses unexplainable phenomenons and mysteries in a quest for clarity. The lead single and opening track, “Bovine Excision,” takes its name from a somehow bloodless cattle mutilation practice, which Samia repurposes as a metaphor for self-extraction. Elsewhere, “Hole in a Frame” references the time Sid Vicious punched a wall of a venue in Tulsa, and the glorification of that empty space, of a void. On a blank page, or as a blank page, others can project their own desires, needs, and fantasies. You become otherworldly; you become “untouchable,” as Samia sings in ethereal harmonies on “Bovine Excision.” On “Lizard,” she confesses how difficult it is to give that up to be authentically herself, and on “Pants,” she questions who she even was before, chasing a past version of herself that no longer exists.
During the live studio performance, she sings these tracks along with the yet-to-be-released “Dare” and a cover of Wilco’s “Heavy Metal Drummer” — a song fittingly about the yearning for a past innocence.
“I’ve spent the past two decades unintentionally conflating an abstract idea of men with my understanding of God,” she continues. “The person I became in order to impress this imagined figure is inseparable from who I am today. With this album, I’ve tried to confront that head-on.”
While she grapples with living truly in the moment and dropping into her honest self, her music provides the groundwork for listeners to do the same. As her crisp vocals captivated the studio, a space acoustically treated to produce the clearest, most polished sounds, it was nearly impossible to think of anything else — anything outside of the present. Besides, of course, when I remembered the full album is out April 25.
Words – Sophie Wang
