"The way people get obsessed with conspiracy theories sort of reminds me of the way people get obsessed with women they don't know," says Samia. The lead single of her third album 'Bloodless' hinges on this specific idea, but the record is full of similarly odd philosophies.
Bovine excision, the bizarre phenomenon and ultimately unsolved mystery of farmers in the US finding their cows dead, drained of blood, and mutilated around their mouths and genitals, was a theory brought to Samia on a date several years ago, and has stuck with her ever since.
"When this guy told me about it, he was like, 'You're my dream girl'. Then he told me about the cows. I found a parallel somehow," she explains, the concept eventually serving as inspiration for both the track named after the conspiracy and the album title.
"I'd been thinking a lot about how the magnitude of what's not there can sometimes trump what is there. I've been thinking about that in relationships a lot; the lack of someone can become so much bigger than they ever were because the less you give, the more people can project onto you. And that obviously pertains to unsolved mysteries. I just love the literal metaphor of there being no blood. So then, obviously, you're thinking about the blood, and where's the blood, you know? It becomes this enormous thing. I felt that, with womanhood in particular, the less you are, the bigger you are, in my experience."
Of course, Samia hasn't written a record about dead cows, but 'Bovine Excision''s lyrics conjure up plenty more surreal images and position them against very normal ones. She sings of the allure of impossibilities, of wanting to be untouchable, and suddenly, the connection between a farmer finding their livestock mutilated in the field and a man finding his perceived dream woman on the first date doesn't seem so far-fetched.
This train of thought echoes through 'Bloodless'. It's less literal and less hooky than her last album, 2023's 'Honey', which leaned into her poppier, synthier side, instead creating something that looks both inward and outward. This time, Samia thinks big, wide, exploring ideologies and tying them to lifelong felt emotions of her own. Take 'Hole In A Frame' – named after the hole punched in Tulsa, Oklahoma's Cain Ballroom green room wall by Sid Vicious, which has since been framed – which sprouts up from a similar seed to 'Bovine Excision', in that the very thing that isn't there is the thing that draws attention; the legacy or idea of a person becomes bigger than their life. "I love that it's literally a framed void, like the lack of the thing is what's being celebrated," she says.
Born in Los Angeles, Samia has been making her way around the US, living in a different state per album. She spent her teen years and early 20s in New York, where she recorded her debut album 'The Baby' in 2020, then moved to Nashville while making 'Honey', before settling in Minneapolis in December, where 'Bloodless' was made. It's where her closest friends and collaborators live, all featured on this album. "I basically asked everyone in my life," says Samia. "I was working with my friends Jake [Luppen, of Hippocampus] and Caleb [Wright, of Happy Children] who've done every record with me, my friend Raffaella wrote almost every song with me, and my boyfriend [Briston Maroney] played guitar on it. It felt like a big homecoming."
"He was like, 'You're my dream girl'. Then he told me about the cows..."
During the writing period, she was getting back into Fiona Apple, who she calls the holy grail, and listening to Mitski's 'Be The Cowboy', Liz Phair, and Lucinda Williams (on CD, because her car didn't have an AUX). The country twang it has seems to be a hangover from her Nashville stint; she expresses a desire to make a country album, although she feels like she hasn't 'earned' it yet ("It's hard to be from New York making a country album"). Samia's spent a lot of time around the globe in a less permanent sense, too, touring her own show and supporting the likes of boygenius and Maggie Rogers, noting that the latter's fearlessness on stage is a spirit she tries to embody in her own singing.
With the themes of 'Bloodless' skewing more personal than ever, it was important for Samia to keep the personnel on this one close to home. "I'm pretty shy," she says, "It takes a lot for me to open up to people, especially in the context of songwriting and music making. I can be pretty neurotic, so I like to keep it to people I really, really trust."
The album sees her confront internal struggles in a way she hadn't been able to before. Present throughout 'Bloodless' is Samia's complex relationship with men, or the overarching ideal of Men; she describes it as similar to a worshipper's relationship with God.
"It's basically just about avoiding making my own decisions, but I realised shamefully that from a young age, I had developed a personality around characteristics that I believed men – this abstract conglomerate idea of men – wanted, and that felt a lot like a relationship to God. In this convoluted way, I was making decisions without having to take responsibility for them, because I was assigning the responsibility to this imaginary figure that, in my experience, represented men. I had a lot of shame about that. I didn't want to be that kind of person. And so where I got with that on this album, I didn't fix it, but I was able to really look it in the face, and I wrote so much about it that it helped me come to a point of acceptance with it, which the intention is to be able to move on from there."
In the past, Samia's expressed her frustration with being labelled a feminist artist; there's no need to dub her music as empowering when she often feels it doesn't come from a place of power. Still, her feminist outlook and upbringing have led her to artists who share those values, with the riot grrrl movement and specifically Kathleen Hanna influencing her on stage performance, and other quote-unquote strong women like Fiona Apple and Liz Phair influencing her lyricism and musical direction.
A middle point on the album, 'Fair Game', feels the most relevant to this mindset, its chorus refrain alluding to how the act of slapping a mosquito off the skin doesn't mean it hasn't already sucked your blood. Meanwhile, 'Lizard' finds religious symbolism in yoga poses and 'Sacred' imagines a near-lifeless body in a pool as godly. With the album often touching on perception and Samia finding herself letting the abstract opinions of men guide her, it seems obvious that decisions she'd make musically would be influenced by those factors, too. The process of creating 'Bloodless' was about learning to trust herself again.
"This is my little emotional journey on this one, too. It's like coming back into my own instincts," she explains. "I was reading a lot of Judith Butler, and they have this ideology about the self being inextricable from its social conditioning. That was really liberating to read, because I'd been trying to get back to like, what do I want, you know, in a vacuum? What do I like, separately from everyone in the world and in my life? Because there's so much rhetoric about that. Don't be a people pleaser, do what you want. What I found with that is it's really hard to know what you want. You know, you can't remove all the voices you've ever heard. Reading that was really helpful, and I was able to be like, you just are little pieces of everything everyone's ever said, and everything you've ever done, and that's fine.
Taken from the May 2025 issue of Dork. Samia's album 'Bloodless' is out 25th April.
