Album Review: SASAMI – Blood On The Silver Screen

Sasami blends raw emotion with infectious pop, capturing love’s bittersweet chaos. 

Good indie-pop gives the listener an intimate experience while balancing the catchiness and liberation of pop. Sasami’s Blood On the Silver Screen excels at this experience. Her confessional lyrics and crisp voice display her range of anger, grief, and regret towards a past relationship. On the first track, “Slugger,” buried amongst the background vocals, Sasami asks, “How come the things that are worth the most… hurt the most.” Singing about being lost in your 30s, referencing Chopin and Steve Lacy in the same lines… Sasami is not afraid to show her strength in acknowledging the mess. Amongst the mess is a beautiful, catchy pop chorus, where Sasami laments that she’s “crying like Dolly from 9 to 5” surrounded by elegantly sleek synths and guitars. 

The slight disco-tinged “I’ll Be Gone” is a highlight of the album. Sasami’s conversational delivery soothes the bombastic production, which weaves in and out of frantic drum beats. Repeating “heart is hungover” several times, each more dire than the last, Sasami’s cyclical mistakes have reached a boiling point. The immediate follow-up “Love Makes You Do Crazy Things” is the answer. Opening with a guitar riff reminiscent of the first bar of Prince’s “When Doves Cry,” Sasami experiments with sound design, placing painfully addictive sixteenth-note hi-hats on top of guitars so distorted they could drill into the listener’s ear. Hyperpop influences fill the second verse, rhythmically keeping the beat with whips and filtered drums. Instantly quotable lyrics like “I know you like my ABCs, and you know all my anatomies” show Sasami’s tongue-in-cheek pop lyrical prowess. 

The album continues with Sasami asking for her lover to return. On “In Love With A Memory (feat. Clairo),” dashes of synths ride with the singers on an “endless highway.” The song has the quality of a slow-motion car crash—a flash of desperation that ripples in your mind for hours afterward. The muted arps act as glass, scaring the face, and the acoustic kicks and stomps beat with the heart. Though the song never justifies a need for Clairo’s feature, her tone blends so well with Sasami that it seems their thoughts form one. 

Blood On the Silver Screen is an exciting addition to the 2025 indie pop catalog, profoundly personal and emotionally resonant while maintaining a magnetic, accessible energy. Sasami navigates the complexities of doubt and reconciliation with a lover, never shying away from the rawness of pain or the sweetness of longing. She sings, “A mouth of honey is worth the sting” in “Nothing But A Sad Face On,” encapsulating the paradox of love—pleasure and hurt often intertwined. This album offers a journey through vulnerability and strength, and its exploration of love’s complications is compelling and cathartic.