Could you be anyone if you fully sacrificed who you already were? Would that make the person you want attention from like you more, because they could build you in their own image from a totally blank canvas? Samia thought about that for a while. She made a whole album about it, actually. It’s called Bloodless. It’s her third and maybe her best.
The musician is explaining what she’ll call the “thesis” of this record to me, sitting on her sofa in her Minneapolis home, which she shares with her dog, who’s been barking at the shed recently. Her hair is tied up and she’s wearing a sweatshirt with a star on it. “The less of your humanness you give,” she says, “the bigger you can become, sort of as an idea.” Acknowledging this revelation about how she had chosen to navigate relationships made her angry at first, like it was some act of cowering. The hollowness became an experiment. “Then I had to come to terms with my own culpability in that and accept that it is super empowering, actually, to kind of not exist.”
She calls it a thesis because Bloodless is not the answer to this personal investigation. Instead, like with all of her records, she spent a few years of her life picking at it like a scab until the scar looked like something that made sense to her. Writing poetry about it, figuring her shit out.
The first time I met Samia Finnerty––that’s her government name––she was with an old actor boyfriend in London in 2017. We were taking photos of him, while she spent time, perfectly pleasantly, on the periphery. We maybe exchanged niceties but I didn’t know who she was beyond, well, being His Girlfriend. Then several years later, she wrote one of my favourite debut records: a piercing and anxious piece of work about the need to be coddled in fear of falling apart. It was called The Baby. I spoke to her about it at the time, and remember, most of all, that she rejected the idea of her songs belonging on ‘Badass Women’ Spotify playlists. “I don’t often write from a place of empowerment,” she said, 23 and already very smart. “Usually, when I’m writing it’s from a place of desperation.”
On 2023’s Honey, critics caught up (The Guardian: “raw, deliciously sad, five stars”). It was an album that opened with a lethal acoustic offering “Kill Her Freak Out,” about watching an old flame meet someone new, and hating the prospect so much that you want to “fucking kill her” and “fucking freak out.” The album was a hit, as far as indie records go, carrying a kind of unexpected buoyancy to balance out its lyrical melancholy. But after it was out there, Samia’s proverbial shit hit the fan. “Everyone warned me about second albums, and I didn’t obviously want to believe it, but it was tough,” she says. The good thing? “It ended up giving me a little bit of a metamorphosis.”
When Samia gets into a pit of depression, she temporarily becomes a new person. After the whirlwind of Honey hit hard, “I developed this really spontaneous, sort of like open minded, reckless personality.” She started saying yes to hanging with strangers, took four-hour flights to rural forests for friends’ birthdays, whereas before, she would have stayed at home. “I went swimming a lot. In, like, bodies of water.” That inspired a lyric on “Bovine Excision,” the album’s lead single, which hearkens back to moments spent “picking leeches off white underwear.”
She had tested out living in Los Angeles, where she was born, after spending time in New York and Nashville, but found the city too steered by the music industry. “There are people who make LA feel like living out the back of a truck somewhere,” she says. But she knew she wasn’t one of them. So Minneapolis came calling, where many of her friends and collaborators lived, and she found it to be a “wellspring for song stuff.”
“My instinct is full-on bridge troll, Rumpelstiltskin, riddles and rhymes, you know?”
samia on writing lyrics
Like The Baby, Bloodless started with poems that she’d take to the piano and try to figure out the melodies for, helped by her allies in life and music, the artist Raffaella, Caleb Wright, and Jake Luppen of the indie rock group Hippo Campus. She has worked with other songwriters and producers before, but “I was sitting on their couch, worried about the clock ticking, so I didn’t write what I wanted to,” she says. This trio knew her well enough to call out her bullshit with her lyrics; telling her when the surgical, somewhat submissive energy of the music, these grandiose reckonings with a higher power, had slathered itself too thickly over the songs. “My instinct is full-on bridge troll, Rumpelstiltskin, riddles and rhymes, you know?” Samia says, laughing. “And I wouldn’t want to lose that, because I know it’s true to me––but between the three of them, they can be like: we can find another word there that people know and use.”
The “unsolved mysteries” that make up the tapestry of Bloodless started to make sense to Samia when she wrote “Proof,” about a year after Honey had come out. On the record, it’s maybe the most conventional Samia song: acoustic guitar and her voice, speaking words simultaneously fatalistic––“The girls bleed and drape over the recliner”––and almost comically plain, the constant refrain of “You don’t know me, bitch.”
The album is laden with gorgeous, enduringly colourful takes on standard singer-songwriter self reflections like this––simultaneously profound and disarmingly simple. On “Pants,” the video for which features The White Lotus star Fred Hechinger dancing in a tent, Samia contemplates the time spent trying on a different personality through the trousers she wears on a flight. “Who was I when I bought these pants?” she questions, following it up with the quip: “They’re non refundable”.
It’s music for the feral, for the nuisances. For the type of person who’s willing to embarrass themselves. It also––despite cutting through its big questions with wistful, loose-living imagery: think drinking piss, flirting with the idea of ruining parties, and Lime-flavoured Lays––feels like the work of a grown up.
Samia thinks that’s a new-found confidence. “I’ve always had this problem where I won’t say anything with my chest unless it could be argued in a court of law,” she says. Her songs have gotten her in trouble with her subjects in the past; at least that way she knew she was right. “I play the tape all the way through, [getting] everyone’s perspective. But on this record, I was like, I don’t know if that’s the best thing for art, you know?” So she just said it this time. “There’s a really crazy, almost surprising theme of acceptance and acquiescence on this album that I didn’t see coming.”
In the process of making it, of scratching the scab and figuring out if there was a logic to this forced nothingness, “I was under the impression that I would do all this unearthing, like I would get to the bottom of this and there would be like a pure self in a vacuum,” Samia says, “and there wasn’t.” She mentions the work of gender theorist Judith Butler: “They have this great piece about how the self can’t exist apart from its social conditioning. It’s just a conglomerate of everything you’ve ever learned and everything anyone’s ever said to you and all of your experiences. So that was really comforting, honestly.”
In the end, after all of this internal rumination, shedding of selves and building of new ones in an effort to figure out who Samia is, the answer to that question was striking and simple: she is “the little pieces of everything anyone’s ever told me,” she says, “and everything I’ve wanted to be.“
‘Bloodless’ by Samia is out 25 April via Grand Jury
WRITTEN BY: Douglas Greenwood
PHOTOGRAPHY: Sawyer Brice
STYLING: Lauren Traiser
PHOTOGRAPHY ASSISTANT: Kye Jouwstra