In 2020, Samia launched a report so heart-wrenching, it was orphic indie pop wrought with darkish musings that felt akin to the social panorama it was launched onto. In some ways, The Baby spoke to Gen-Z tradition completely on the apex of COVID, as songs like “Fit N Full,” “Pool” and “Big Wheel” sought to make sense of betrayal, sensuality and relationship dynamics via reflection and diaristic lyricism. The imagery on the report so typically tapped right into a wealthy, fluid realism that teetered on the sting of esoteric. On her latest album, Honey, she makes her songwriting extra private than ever earlier than, punctuating her pedigree of delivering frank, lovely music that gnaws away on the elements of humanity left to be untangled.
Three years in the past, Samia was lauded for making music that was profound and private but extensively accessible. The Baby was fantastically assembled, although she wasn’t the primary musician to take her deepest feelings and put them into the world so others can name them their very own. But The Baby proved that the best way she interacted together with her environment had an edge to it that separated her from her friends. When that perspective will get taken away, nevertheless, the place does a songwriter go subsequent? For Samia throughout lockdown, the reply was clear: “I had to write about old experiences, because nothing was really happening, from this fresh perspective,” she says.
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In early 2020, Samia, like the remainder of us, discovered herself sequestered in solitude, unable to make poetry out of the current — which ended up being a blessing in disguise. “I’m a person who’s really afraid of being alone, so I had to face a lot of things,” she says. The Baby was expansive in the way it turned a house for each listener. Its follow-up, nevertheless, can be Samia’s alternative to present herself the identical house. “I had more room to be totally honest because I was sitting with myself more often and getting closer to the bottom of the reasons why I felt the way I did,” she provides. “That allowed me to be hyperspecific in a way that I was scared to do before.”
Flash-forward two years, when Samia decamped to Betty’s, a North Carolina studio owned by Nick Sanborn and Amelia Meath of Sylvan Esso, together with her buddy and collaborator Caleb Wright to make Honey — her burgeoning, mystical, and deeply forthright sophomore report. Honey is sparsely organized and paired with a robust story holding many throughlines; extra so right here than ever earlier than, Samia is cataloging her experiences for us to know, not undertake. The thesis of the songs being a fragmented relationship is a well-known circumstance, however Samia’s songwriting layers the report with vivid, particular imagery, like a Porches present at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, a lover’s mother threatening suicide, and doing anti-porn chants with evangelicals outdoors an ex’s window.
As different indie artists elect to go larger and louder on their second albums, Samia approached Honey a lot otherwise. It’s closely populated with delicate moments that give approach to well-timed dance numbers. At the apex of Honey, the solemn, empty-room piano ballad “Pink Balloon” organically transforms into “Mad At Me,” an evocative, sensory nightclub anthem. The lush retrospect of a withering romance on the previous collapses right into a paean about not being keep away from fallout. It may be simple to check Samia to different girls in indie. Honey thrives like a Phoebe Bridgers-Dua Lipa hybrid, however a observe like “Mad at Me” is an ideal illustration of the digital elasticity of Samia’s creativity.
How Samia was capable of make such acute, upbeat adjustments of route — just like the title observe or “Amelia” — work with the aesthetic of your complete album is due partly to her partnership with Wright, whom she considers certainly one of her closest associates and the musician and producer she trusts greater than anybody else. “[Wright and I] both really prioritize supporting the sentiment and supporting the song, and, coincidentally, it just happened to be that a lot of the songs needed to be spare and minimal for us to be able to tell the story the way we wanted to,” she says.
Wright and Samia collectively have grown since 2020. They, together with Nathan Stocker and Jake Luppen, labored collectively on The Baby and have been attempting to be sensible about their strategy. Now it’s a 50-50 collaboration between them and their inventive inclinations. “When you have a debut, it feels like a lot of pressure to be the person you want to be,” Samia says. That all modified through the pandemic, when she opted to let go of interesting to the plenty by being relentlessly intimate within the face of environmental and sociological finality. “For [Honey], especially coming after COVID-19, [Wright and I] are more interested in being honest,” Samia provides. “If we were to die tomorrow, what would we want to say, and how would we want to say it? And, at the risk of not being totally accessible to everyone, I think it was important for us both to just say what we were feeling and to capture the environment we were in.”
[Photo by Sophia Matinazad]
After two years of reflection, Samia hasn’t hardened. Her preparations have softened, even when she pierces via the gloom with a music that may enrapture you in a nightclub. “There are these huge moments of relief or release where we get to dance it off,” Samia provides. “That’s what we were aiming for, to really only to and use those moments when it felt like it was absolutely time to step away from the darkness.” An explosive, cathartic music like “Honey,” which Samia wrote in quarter-hour, is what she considers to be the fruits of your complete venture, therefore it being the title. “That song, just personally, I’m sure, will read differently to people,” she provides. “But that song, to me, represents the whole story that I’m trying to tell with this record.”
The surface-level story that Honey tells, lyrically, begins with “Kill Her Freak Out,” the place Samia reckons with the anger that stems from feeling unloved. She taunts her ex, proclaiming she’ll kill whoever he marries after which remembers reminiscences of worship songs, shedding her state ID and having goals of being pregnant. By the album’s finish, on “Dream Song,” Samia is in a unique place, singing of forgiveness. It’s not only a assortment of tracks about disappointment and breakups. No, Honey goals to trace the private trauma of two lovers parting methods, instructed from the perspective of any individual who has no selection however to cut back each layer and piece collectively some type of understanding.
That songwriting enormously informs the musical story of Honey, which poignantly particulars the ecological basis {that a} relationship creates. Bonds break, folks transfer and the world retains turning, however the roots retain power. Samia understands that now and clings to the imagery of Pando, a grove of 80,000-year-old Aspen timber in Utah which can be actually a single organism comprising 40,000 particular person timber. The arboraceous metaphor captures Samia’s strategy to record-making altogether, as all 11 tracks on Honey are connective tissue forming into one entity of catharsis aglow with oncoming hope.
Perspective is the whole lot to Samia, which she generously emphasizes on “Sea Lions,” a piano ballad that swells into an digital breakdown merging an automatic voice together with her octave-surfing harmonies. Though it’s refined, Honey offers with how musical fame can have an effect on a relationship or catalyze its dissolution, and Samia comes to the conclusion that it’s not reconciliation she seeks. She desires to cross paths with the folks of her previous and proceed figuring out them. It’s a theme immediately addressed on “Sea Lions.” “You said when I come on the radio it makes you wanna die/Well if I shut up, can I come inside?” Samia sings. “I don’t wanna talk/I don’t ever wanna work it out/We’re too far gone/I just wanna see your house.”
Samia calls Honey a “community record” and likens her listeners, associates and songs to an “ecosystem.” On the album, she culls a habitat-like sense of marvel for the folks round her and the music she makes, one thing she purposely seemed for through the pandemic. “Curating community is a big passion of mine,” she says. “That was a big priority with this record, just trying to choose the people I was working with with intention and give them the space to be fully collaborative.” You can hear that affect on Honey, as collaborators like Christian Lee Huston, Rostam and Briston Maroney have their fingerprints in all places. It modified the alchemy of the venture altogether, most significantly due to how malleable and impressionable Samia is as a musician — though she wasn’t all the time copacetic about listeners listening to the ticks and methods of different artists in her music. Beyond that, nevertheless, she has all the time labored in shut quarters with different artists, letting her personal abilities flourish by witnessing her friends play.
“To have [Huston and Rostam] work so closely on [Honey], you can really hear them, and you can really hear their influence on me, which I used to be wary of or nervous about,” she provides. “Now I think it’s just the coolest thing. I hate doing anything alone, especially curating art. It’s always been natural to me to reach out for help and collaboration, and I feel so lucky that those particular people were willing to work on my stuff. I was really not expecting that.”
In current years, few debut data as mystifying as The Baby have been adopted up with a venture as deftly inspiring as Honey. Samia is not attacking her personal work with lyricism that everybody can latch onto. Instead, she’s utilizing private progress to make amends with retrospect, tackling outdated reminiscences in new methods. “I had 10 years to write the songs on [The Baby], and I had barely two to write [Honey],” she says. “At the beginning of the process, I was like, ‘There’s no way I’m gonna do this. Not that much has happened since I wrote [The Baby].’ But I landed on something that really felt right.” Samia attributes a lot of that call to Wright, who accompanied her throughout their handful of week-long studio periods. “There are very few people in the world who I feel comfortable being totally honest with, and he’s one of them,” she provides.
For the primary time, Samia wished to simplify the whole lot and simply let herself have emotions. That choice is what makes Honey the brightest report of 2023 to this point, teeming with confessionals and transparency. “I’m writing songs to communicate things to people that I’m too scared to say in conversation because I hate confrontation,” she says. “I also am pathologically trying to hold myself accountable all the time. I have a really hard time just feeling my feelings without picturing them in the context of a court of law and seeing if my argument would hold up, objectively.”
Half of Honey is zoomed out, as Samia makes an attempt to know how her emotions comprise the larger image. The different half is, as she places it, her “wallowing in it,” however with a aptitude of knowledge. “If I’ve learned anything in the past couple of years, it’s that it’s just as important to get to the other side as it is trying to be objective and trying to be mature,” she says. Much of the record deals with alcohol being consumed as a method of escape. Few club songs build an honest portrayal of how grief can manifest itself through dancing; the transitions into slowed-down parts mimic the lull of isolation. In an era where drinking to feel less is romanticized, Samia has devised a record that plainly illustrates how destructive the last few years have been. What a gift to watch her unfurl her own past with such attentiveness and veracity. Even more so, Honey units a benchmark for extra accountability in indie rock to come back.
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