Bovine excision, a mysterious phenomenon involving the bloodless surgical removal of cattle organs, serves as the eerie inspiration for the opening track of Samia's third album, aptly titled Bloodless. Her voice flows through the evocative lyrics with ease, weaving through the gentle strum of a lone acoustic guitar. The quiet intimacy builds into a storm of sound, culminating in
Samia's layered, ethereal harmonies that pierce with a haunting, macabre refrain: "And drained, drained bloodless."
These emptied cattle evoke a grotesque vessel she unwittingly nurtured in an attempt to embody something both untouchable and on display, overflowing with infinite projections and capable of driving an unrelenting pursuit of the unattainable. Through sharp images—Diet Dr. Pepper and Raymond Carver as parallel pursuits of minimalism, white underwear and leeches, a Degas dancer poised at the bannister—Samia examines a paradoxical existence where merit transforms into a calculated act of extraction ("I felt the pea, can I eat it?"). This is just one strand Samia weaves into the intricate tapestry of Bloodless.
Her 2020 debut album, The Baby, marked a confessional coming-of-age —an intimate love letter to those sentiments that are most difficult to articulate. In her 2023 album Honey, Samia deepens this exploration of young adulthood, offering a more introspective take as she searches for clarity. These releases, including her 2021 EP Scout, alongside her magnetic live performances, have earned her widespread critical acclaim, over 150 million streams, and a devoted fan base who sing along passionately to every word at sold-out shows. She’s also won over new audiences opening for artists like Maggie Rogers, Lucy Dacus, and Courtney Barnett.
“I’ve spent the past two decades unintentionally conflating an abstract idea of men with my understanding of God,” Samia explains. “The person I became in order to impress this imagined figure is inseparable from who I am today. With this album, I’ve tried to confront that head-on.”
Bloodless explores her relationship with a fragmented, symbolic version of Men—a patchwork of expectations and imagined standards she tried to meet, which ultimately shaped her sense of self.
“I suffer from decision paralysis,” she admits, “where I’ll mentally play out every possible choice and endure the consequences in my head. God and Men provide some aspect of relief here in that they will make choices for you. The great thing about God and my Figment Man is that I decide what either of them wants me to do. So, in this convoluted way, I still get to do what I want, while offloading the responsibility.”
Hole in a Frame, the album's contemplative centerpiece, references a framed section of wall at a Tulsa venue where, in 1978, Sid Vicious punched a hole — the absence, that lack, absurdly glorified. “It's easier to be an idea than a person,” Samia reflects. “Your distorted proxy protects you from stagnation. I find a certain logic in canonizing a void, and even more in trying to become one. It feels familiar, and comforting. Unlike the actual you, your lack only grows in value and mystery with time.”
On Lizard, with its bright, sing-song melody and teetering synths, Samia confesses, “It’s painful to stay present, to exist as a real, flesh-and-blood person at a party, after existing comfortably as a myth or a memory. And it was even more painful to try not to ruin a party I’d already ruined.
“I wanted to stop punishing myself by denying that a significant part of my personality was built around traits and behaviors I believed—whether through observation or hearsay—men would like,” she explains. “I began to compare it to a relationship with God, where believers shape their entire lives around His commandments, even though they were never explicitly asked to do so.”
For Bloodless, Samia reunited with producers Caleb Wright—of her favorite band, The Happy Children—and Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus,who also happens to be her neighbor in Minneapolis. She recently relocated there after a year in LA, three years in Nashville, and spending her teens and early 20s in New York City. Rounding out the team is Samia’s close friend and fellow artist Raffaella, who inspired the song North Poles. Together they’ve created a space where Samia can be both vulnerable and challenged.
Recorded in North Carolina and Minneapolis, Bloodless is a richly layered album that shifts seamlessly from sparse folk to sweeping indie-pop epics. Tracks like Fair Game explore duality, “oscillating between idealized and demonized versions of myself, fantasizing about fully embodying either." Meanwhile, Sacred uncovers “someone’s capacity for love through their hatred.”
The album concludes with the shimmering and unconventional Pants, centered around the biting lyric: “Who was I when I bought these pants? / They’re non-refundable / Now I’m questioning everything I am.” The song delves into the endless, often fruitless search for a version of ourselves we believe once existed, only to realize that this “original” self was never a fixed identity. It’s a realization that can make us feel like strangers in our own lives, second-guessing even the smallest choices.
Across these thirteen songs, Samia grapples with the hollow form she once embodied—a vessel that gained value through its own absence, until playing dead became its own form of life. With Bloodless, she endeavors to disinter the self buried beneath these carefully constructed personas, ultimately reaching a place of acceptance for her whole, imperfect being.
Hank Heaven
Hank Heaven never intended to be a songwriter. Raised in New York’s Hudson Valley in a family of professional musicians, Hank emerged as something of a guitar wunderkind, enamored with and excelling in the swing music of yore. Django Reinhardt was a specialty. Still a teenager, they toured the world with jazz bands before moving to Brooklyn and becoming a guitarist for hire in the modern ranks of magnetic indie acts—Samia, Del Water Gap, and Gus Dapperton, just to sample. They were content with that career, too, locking into parts while sharpening their skills on high-stakes stages. Why would Hank need songs of their own?
But it never stays that simple. Early in 2022, Hippo Campus singer Jake Luppen co-produced the start of a new quartet called Peach Fuzz—Samia, Hank, Ryann, and Raffaella Meloni. Around that time, Luppen heard that Hank had melodic ideas and tuneful bits of their own, and he encouraged Hank to keep working, to develop these songs of their own. Hank did, soon heading to Minneapolis to hang out and write with Meloni and Luppen, by then his partner. They developed these songs in friendship. Call Me Hank—a charming and smart five-track EP, where an aching piano ballad about dejection shared room with sharp and hooky rejoinders about substandard partners—emerged only a year later. One of 2023’s most promising EPs, those songs announced that Luppen and Meloni had been right: Hank had plenty to say, and they could also go anywhere, hopscotching from hyperpop to pop-country and from melancholy to mirth.
The evolution of Hank, both musically and personally, has since been brisk by necessity. In the first category, Hank has realized that they’ve essentially spent their whole life preparing to make guitar-based pop, and there’s no need to betray that as they build Loaded Dice, the LP they’re finishing as you read these words. All those other loves—torch songs, textural abstraction, electronic radiance—remain, but it’s mostly folded into songs shaped by a guitarist so good that skill alone could have sustained them for a lifetime. You can clearly hear the licks of a classically trained and perennially sharp guitarist here, early inspiration recast as new fodder.
Perhaps most important, though, is Hank’s emerging sense of self-acceptance and the way it shows up in these new numbers. As Hank came out as nonbinary, they too began to wrestle with personal issues that felt like the barriers between adolescence and adulthood, from substance abuse to love addiction to, as they put it, “gambling on everything and expecting it to get you there,” whatever there happens to be. If Hank Heaven used to be a character for an emerging songwriter still struggling with their old identity and born name, it is now a full person, wrestling with all the intricacies that entails.
Hank is not so good at talking about their feelings, in sitting with friends for some heart-to-heart fireside. Instead, in these last few years, they’ve learned that writing a song and sending it to a close circle of pals is the best to check in, to say, “Hey, here’s what I’m dealing with—or, frankly, failing to.” Take “Plan 2,” the first glimpse at what will become Loaded Dice: Hank strolls through a crowd, swilling High Life with a girl on their arm—“the love of my life,” Hank sings, voice wavering slightly inside an electronic haze, “just for the night.” This will be fun and good, at least until it isn’t. “I’m doing better as soon as I remember,” Hank sings in the surging chorus, “but I keep on forgetting the plan.” This is the tug between simultaneously accepting and rejecting parts of yourself you don’t always love, recognizing that they exist but not giving up on the fight to reconcile them with your other priorities.
“Reno,” the Loaded Dice opener-to-be, probes the same propensity to bet on anything that might give you temporary pleasure. More settled and dour than “Plan 2,” with strings sweeping beneath Hank’s guitar jangle, “Reno” remains a funny boast about how many ladies Hank can land and how many jackpots they can win—even if it’s in Nevada’s second most-famous city. This is a beautifully sad brag, though, Hank flaunting what they think they can score as a temporary replacement for what they know they do not yet have, like stability and satisfaction. This protagonist is an exaggerated version of Hank themselves, their faults and enthusiasms blown up until Hank can see and maybe understand them from a safe distance.
No, Hank never meant to be a songwriter, but it has become an essential part of their existence now, a process through which they begin to understand themselves. Their songs and their life, then, form something of a feedback loop, each shaping the other in a circle with Hank at the center. Hank still plays guitar for hire, currently working on a stage off Broadway in a house band. But songwriting is now an essential part of their art and their being, the lens through which they see themselves in the world. And the struggles in these songs are not just Hank’s, of course. If you’ve never wobbled on the complicated precipices between being fun and being good, between growing up and getting wild, have you ever really lived?
