Samia sings in code to hide herself but lays her anguish bare on her incisive and visceral third album.

Indie rock darling Samia Finnerty, who performs as Samia, broke out with a Spotify-boosted debut single followed by critically acclaimed debut LP The Baby (2020) and scene-y sophomore record Honey (2023). 

That record’s title track tends to stick with you, thanks to its sweet, swaying hook—but also the dark underbelly that’ll catch you by surprise, even after months of hearing it in a friend’s car or on an algorithmic playlist. “I’ve got a good feeling about this weekend, do you want to go to Baby’s?” Samia sings. “It’s all honey, honey.” She’s having a fun night with friends! She’s having one of those weekends where being alive comes easy! Then it’s “if you give me a beer, I’ll forget to watch what I eat and I don’t care” and “all you can do from this hotel room is fantasize / all you can do when he needs you is close your eyes.”

Wait, what? 

Samia loves to write in code, a habit that’s especially impactful when sound as well as lyrics obscures her meaning: she isn’t hiding anything in “Honey,” but its warm embrace sways listeners into a daze that makes the revelation of the song’s true subject matter unsettling. And that’s the title track of the album, Samia claims she wrote out of code (sometimes to its detriment).

Thank god, in Bloodless Samia is back to her lyrical tricks.

On the phenomenal “Bovine Excision,” she sings, “I wanna be untouchable / I wanna be impossible.” It’s the battle cry of a woman who wants total intimacy, vulnerability, and exposure, as well as total remove, power, and inviolability. She tries for it on this record by boxing intimate confessions into fine-point observations, references, and viscera and hiding them all around her overgrown yard.

The record itself sounds like a Southern summer night on a screened-in porch overlooking that yard: naturalistic, thick, dark, and still. Samia recorded in North Carolina, and that terroir, plus her Nashville residency of late, bleed in beautifully. 

In the first verse of single “Hole in a Frame” Samia sings “a little death goes a long way,” in context a forget-your-Sex-Pistols-history-and-you’ll-miss-it reference to Sid Vicious’ death. In the second verse, she sings “like a photograph of the last time I came, a little death goes a long way,” an allusion to the French term for orgasm, literally meaning “little death.” In the age of Gracie Abrams’ cardboard confessions and AOTY winner Kacey Musgraves singing “I’m kinda sad,” it’s victorious to hear Samia lament the lack of a lover left using a tapestry of evocative innuendos, collectively moving closer to expressing her hurt than a straight shot could.

That hurt is the core of at least the first half of the record, which finds Samia lurking around every corner, stewing on her wounds. In Bloodless, Samia is Jennifer Check peering out of that black lake — the scene is calm and placid, but make no mistake, the current roiling underneath is vicious. The forceful “Carousel” reads as a wide-eyed love song, but a thudding, building, then crashing instrumental wall—the Eldritch enormity of the feeling—signals danger. All the while, Samia’s even voice, dark like tinted glass, is matter-of-fact, in total control. Even when the Nashville influence veers dangerously close to a stomp-clap revival, as on “Spine Oil,” an off-kilter sound and that cool voice create a foreboding, yet assured quietude. 

From her coded remove Samia hands down warnings tinged with violence: “you can go outside on a hot night and clap, but you won’t get your blood back,” “you’ve mistaken my joy for weakness, baby your mistake, your mistake and it won’t go down easy,” “you keep flashing your angle / do you wanna see mine?” Yet Samia never goes Rambo; her power comes from her sage, assured certainty, like when “you never loved me like you hate me now” lands like a blow, not a sob.

Samia is lurking in the shadows: she can see you and she remembers. But where is she?

The album’s second half finds Samia reckoning with herself. On “Craziest Person,” she sings, “I’d rather hear someone else’s problems / than worry about what I’m supposed to do.” On “Proof,” she pushes friends away by telling them “you don’t know me, bitch.” On “North Poles”: “when you see yourself in someone, how can you look at them?” And on the apotheosis of this theme, “Pants,” her bafflement that a version of herself existed who bought a pair of pants causes her to dissolve entirely. “Wanna see what’s under these Levi’s? I got nothin under these Levi’s.”

In her pain and insecurity Samia aches to disappear into a wisp on a wind—nowhere, impossible, unknowable, untouchable—but her close attention to the material world betrays her love of it. Her power comes from conjuring the minutiae of the horrors: lime Lays, full leeches in her underwear, cigarettes, the memory of the last time she came; even a 24 pack of Miller Lite and a can of biscuits, which she describes in the last track as a sort of communion, a baptism out of the purgatory of the scorned.