Album Review: Bloodless by Samia

Being cast as someone's dream girl could be considered a subtle form of erasure. The label may sound flattering, but the job description is more like a slow undoing: be sweet, be silent, be bloodless. On her third album, Samia Finnerty takes that hollowness and builds a world around it--eerie, self-aware, poetically elegant. Bloodless marks a departure from the hushed vulnerability of 2023's Honey.

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There won't be blood The review summary is my attempt at a joke, but the word "blood" actually does come up plenty on Samia's latest full-length. Couple that with the kinda creepy look of the album artwork, and you might surmise this effort is much more menacing and/or edgy than it actually is. The singer-songwriter's lyrical style has always been a cryptic mix of oddly specific details and overall abstraction, but as best I can tell, the focus here is on growing up and the development, maintenance, and loss of personal identity.

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Fittingly, all of the colour is drained from the artwork for Bloodless, with a grainy greyscale Samia at an even greater distance, retinas reflecting the flash, looking down while bent over. This is all worth noting, because as these perspectives of her image on the cover have changed, her music has changed alongside them. Perhaps this is observed most presciently in not the soundscapes themselves, but the way Samia presents herself in her writing, angling the frame of reference to account for more points of view than the insular first-person singular.

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You can take 100 rising indie pop stars; none will quite match her destructive blade that cuts moments of beauty out of self-destructive tendencies, body image issues, family dynasty, aging, and, most often, raw reality. She opens 2023's Honey by threatening murder. At many points, Bloodless, her third studio album, attempts to reconstruct this violent, acerbic demeanor, but doesn't know what to do with itself.

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A delayed shuffle kicks in after the first chorus of 'Bovine Excision', the opening track of Samia's third album 'Bloodless. ' A simultaneous guitar stab and drum hit highlights the drum's previous absence, and - akin to the first verse of its opener - 'Bloodless' finds comfort in absence, whether it's referencing cattle mutilation or Sid Vicious' framed fist print in 'Hole in a Frame'. Seemingly, Samia has never been one to shy away from a complex theme or a darkly- outlined metaphor: her 2023 breakout and award-winning record 'Honey' touched on themes of nihilism and murder.

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Samia's third studio album, Bloodless, is a gruesome, precise, and poetic act of self-surgery. Across 13 tracks built on complex tensions, the Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter dissects the performance of identity, the ache to be known, and the fear of being misunderstood. The result is often beautiful, but it doesn't come easy. This is transformation by scalpel, told in songs that are messy, defiant, and unflinchingly honest.

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Samia is on the move. In the period following her exceptional 2023 breakout 'Honey' the songwriter has laid down new roots, swapping Nashville for Minneapolis. A city with its own sense of heritage, the setting has enabled her to build a fresh team, one that allows her to be both vulnerable and challenged. Caleb Wright - from The Happy Children, also her favourite band - joins on production, with near-neighbour Jake Luppen (from indie heroes hippo campus) also stepping into the studio.

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