Samia is an artist who would be an easy favourite of the indie under-30 demographic if only she got a bit more attention. She first got widespread attention in 2017 with her song ‘Someone Tell the Boys’ after it was featured on Spotify’s ‘Badass Women’ playlist and has since become her most played song on the platform. The Verge called it an ‘anti-mansplaining anthem’ as the singer told them it came from a point of exasperation with men in the music industry who ‘fancied themselves really knowledgeable and important,’ the type whom I am sure none of us have trouble imagining. This left the singer swearing to never ‘work with anyone who’s mean to [her] again,’ which might seem like an obvious move but for a musician, who was unsigned at the time, in an industry where sacrifices and mansplainers alike are rife, this could have easily stunted her professional growth. However it is now three years later and keeping to her principles seems to have treated the 23 year old New Yorker well as she is signed to Grand Jury Music, a label that represents big names like Hippo Campus and Rubblebucket among many others, with her debut album, The Baby, coming out at the end of August.

Samia’s sound is both new and old; all the raw emotion of FKA twigs combined with wonderfully imperfect vocals that are almost reminiscent of The Bangles front-woman Susanna Hoffs. The most abundant theme throughout her entire discography is an honesty that goes beyond truth and into oversharing, but in a way that makes her all the more relatable. Samia deals, expectedly, with heartbreak and longing in her music (found in ‘Is There Something in the Movies?’ and ‘Paris’), but more uniquely her introspection lends itself to the less-tackled emotions of guilt, shame, regret, and so on.

The guilt and regret portions of this painful jambalaya are best shown in one of the singer’s earliest tracks, ‘Welcome to Eden,’ released around the same time as ‘Someone Tell the Boys’ in 2017. Within a few lines we can hear Samia’s pain about losing friends and flitting between literal and metaphorical meaning as she sings about ‘drugs and their adverse effects / like people do when they’ve lost a friend.’ She starts ambiguously and blames herself, ‘and not the drugs in the end’ for the lost friend, before singing more literally about burying someone ‘on a New England beach’ and how they are dead ‘due to my negligence.’ Whatever the truth might be, it is easy to hear her pain as she goes through the lyrics, and while she never sounds like she is holding back, there is no doubt the lines are hard to get through. 

Another oddly specific story from her youth is shared in the song ‘Lasting Friend’ which leans into slightly more rock-oriented instrumentation with more prominent electric guitars than usual. The lyrics detail a ‘party trick’ she used to perform in high school; letting boys ‘line up in the gym / and touch my boobs each day at noon,’ in the hopes of making titular lasting friends and achieving something like the cool girl persona made famous by Gone Girl. If you do not know what I mean, I strongly recommend you look it up or ask any woman. At first Samia repeats over and over again that she is ‘not ashamed of my past,’ right up until the outro where the guitars lessen until it’s barely more than the vocals and she says that ‘I’ll be ashamed of my past.’ Whether this is a genuine admittance or another switch to please, (from cool girl to repenting nice girl, archetype to archetype), it still shows the depth and complications of the choices people, specifically women, feel like they have to make. The music video for ‘Lasting Friend’ mirrors the song. It is shot and acted comically but ends with Samia seemingly bludgeoning another version of herself with a shovel, possibly saying something deeper about regret, self-hatred, or some other typically fun emotion of youth.

There is more to Samia than ballads and incredibly personal retellings of her life story, namely in the summery-sounding ‘Ode to Artifice’ and upbeat ‘21.’ Both are still introspective – the former about the fear of losing a relationship and the latter about that feeling of lacking, of poor performance that comes with getting older, the starting insecurities that sometimes turn into so-called quarter life crises – but they sound far more light-hearted. Samia’s latest single ‘Fit N Full’ fits into this same pattern, energised but hiding a discussion of body image and perception in the lyrics. 

‘Fit N Full’ and ‘Is There Something in the Movies?’, both from her forthcoming debut album, are some of her best releases yet and bode well for the album as the attention they have received hopefully signals the start of Samia’s move into mainstream popularity, undoubtedly without compromising her music.

The Baby will be available from August 28th via Grand Jury Music

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