Bloodless [LP]

Samia - Bloodless [LP]

On her third album Bloodless, Samia seeks comfort in absence. Its easier to be what someone wants you to be if you give as little as possible, she says. 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 someones head; you become a lot bigger with distance, she reflects, exploring the allure of existing as a fantasy. Through haunting harmonies and spectral imagery, the album 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. Rich with layers that shift seamlessly from sparse folk to sweeping indie-pop epics, Bloodless explores Samias relationship with a fragmented, symbolic version of Men-a patchwork of expectations and imagined standards she tried to meet, which ultimately shaped her sense of self. Ive spent the past two decades unintentionally conflating men with my understanding of God, Samia explains. The person I became in order to impress this imagined figure is inseparable from who I am today. With this album, Ive tried to confront that head-on. Written & produced in both North Carolina and her new home of Minneapolis throughout 2024, Bloodless finds Samia reuniting with longtime-collaborator Caleb Wright and Jake Luppen for the highly-anticipated follow-up to 2023s revered Honey, which followed Samias 2020s breakthrough debut The Baby. Across these thirteen songs, Samia grapples with the hollow form she once embodied - a vessel that gained value through its own absence, until playing dead became its own form of life. With Bloodless, she endeavors to unearth the self buried beneath these carefully constructed personas, ultimately reaching a place of acceptance for her whole, imperfect being.