Samia, 'Bloodless' Album Review

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Every Samia album is a coming-of-age story. As per its title, 2020’s The Baby started at the beginning and, in sharp vignettes, she explored the formative moments of early adulthood: first loves, first experiences with grief, and panicking at the party. Her follow-up, 2023’s Honey, tracked her narrator’s people-pleasing tendencies as she grew older. But Bloodless is about a different kind of growing up, as Samia asks, “Who am I when I strip away all the ways that other people see me?” Or, as she fears by the album’s end, “Who was I when I bought these pants?” Bloodless is a relentless interrogation of what makes up a self. It’s her darkest, most existential, and most fearless album. It may also be her best.

After the 15-second “Biscuits Intro,” the album properly begins in “Bovine Excision,” a masterful supercut of being twenty-something in the 2020s. There’s the friend who flirts with the bartender, night swims, time spent parked in driveways, snacking on lime-flavored Lay’s. Samia’s thoughts interject these scenes; she decides what kind of person she is in each moment. “I wanna be untouchable, I wanna be impossible,” she repeats, before changing her mind later on. By the track’s end, Samia is “drained bloodless.” (The titular bovine excision is a mysterious death of an animal where the corpse has no blood.) She harmonizes with herself over that final lyric, and the high notes are clear and realized: A bovine excision might be happening to herself, and if it is, who can a person be without blood, without a sense of who they are?

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Samia spends Bloodless prodding at that question, armed with gender theory (she’s been reading a lot of Judith Butler), fierce vulnerability, and her usual trio of collaborators: Caleb Wright, Jake Luppen, and Raffaella. The songs span relationships, friendships, pool parties, carousel rides, and backyard hangouts, but they all return to the idea of “bloodlessness”—an emptiness that occurs when your sense of self is determined by the way you’re perceived, especially by men. The writing is richly human and gladly vulnerable. On “Dare,” there are obfuscated references to sex (“I felt the current of your dare”) and failures in communication, concluding in one of Samia’s truest letters: “I can’t stop crossing the line, and you can’t stop trying to keep me on the other side. If only you could read my mind.” She finds relief in being “the second craziest person in the room.” “Sacred” allows her to reconcile with the eschewed affections of a man who won’t “love [her] like [he] hates her now.”

Musically, Bloodless is unrestrained to a single palette: There’s the folk-rock of “Spine Oil,” the minimal guitar strums on “Proof,” the pastel-pop of “Lizard,” and the bubbles of AutoTune lingering in the undertow of “Craziest Person.” Samia is more daring with her arrangements than ever before, especially on “Carousel,” a song distant and uncanny until it explodes into power chords igniting a catharsis. The six-minute closer “Pants” ignores any pop structure at all, transitioning from a cinematic build to breezy, folk-like waves ebbing and flowing.

If Samia finds any remedy for “bloodlessness,” it’s in the album’s final two songs. “North Poles” is an ode to her writing partner and friend Raffaella. It’s the project’s warmest moment, a heartland rock song about realizing you’re known not just by other people, but by yourself too. And “Pants” engages with the problem head-on: “How long have I been here?” Samia asks. How long has this version (or this pair of pants, if you will) been the current version of myself? On the cover of Bloodless, she is blurry and distant. But this album is the closest she’s ever been, and in the album’s final stanza, she reaches a clarity she’s been tailing since 2020: “Maybe you start living the moment. You stop feeling so dumb.” Samia has graduated from the transitory fixtures that colored The Baby and Honey. And if all you’ll ever be is seen in the eyes of others, then take the advice of “North Poles” and surround yourself with people you love.

Bloodless is both wayward and painfully sharp, its songs potent with matter-of-fact lines that cut to the heart of it all without ever spelling anything out. References to leeches, blood pacts, and blood lost buoy at the surface of Samia’s sometimes-oblique writing. She’s “a sun bug” with “no shortage of brilliance, if you can catch me in a clear cup,” shining only when trapped in the glass. Or, she “wants to hitch [her] fire to your candle,” burning only when constricted by the wax. Oftentimes, the lyrics hit with inarguable certainty: “You don’t know me bitch,” she puts it, simply enough, on “Proof.” Bloodless is the work of a poet at the top of her game.

Andy Steiner is a writer and musician. When he’s not reviewing albums, you can find him collecting ‘80s Rush merchandise. Follow him on Twitter.

Samia Gets Existential on Bloodless

The New York musician’s third album may also be her best. The writing is richly human and gladly vulnerable, fearlessly interrogating what makes up a self.