Five Samia songs that deserve more attention
TikTok and music work in mysterious ways. Sometimes they manage to find a deserving new artist from the masses and skyrocket them to rightful success. However, on other occasions, the star they spotlight is already established but deserving of more flowers, like Samia.
Samia is not new. First releasing music way back in 2017, ‘Someone Tell The Boys’ instantly caught attention for her unique voice and even more unique lyricism, piecing together hyperspecific imagery to somehow make something deeply relatable.
Since then, it’s been gold after gold. Her debut album, The Baby, came out in 2020 and is packed with poignancy and a vision so crystal that it’s clear Samia instantly knew herself as an artist and what she wanted to do. It’s an album that defies easy labelling as she weaves between lo-fi, indie-pop, heavier indie-rock, and folk elements. Across the two albums that would follow, those different textures would only get more complex and more interesting.
Her most recent release, Bloodless, only came out in April, but that’s not what social media is currently obsessing over. Instead, TikTok suddenly discovered her 2023 NPR Tiny Desk concert, which she finished with a staggeringly beautiful rendition of ‘Pool’. While the album version is lo-fi, this live take was acoustic and folkish, packed with harmonies that get right at the heart. As the world took notice, she gave them what they wanted by swiftly re-recording the track and releasing that stripped version.
She more than deserves it. ‘Pool’ is a gorgeous track, and Samia has long since been an artist to whom more people should pay attention. So if you’re newly on board, give these five tracks your attention first as a selection of truly underappreciated gems in her discography.
The five Samia songs that deserve more attention:
‘As You Are’
As tender of a love song as they come, this 2021 stand-alone single is less of a traditional romance and more of a reminder of what to expect. Floating through a series of hyperspecific images and memories, like all the best Samia tracks do, ‘As You Are’ is a travelogue of shorts, dropping in on moments where love was vivid and made sense, like her mother waving from a window or a sister cleaning her room for a visit.
Underpinned by the simplest of lyrics, she sings “When somebody loves you / They take you as you are.” Spiralling over a gorgeous lo-fi nest and a marching beat, it becomes an affirmation to tell yourself over and over, as if Samia is reminding herself but reminding us too.
‘Dream Song’
“There are six minutes of brain activity after the body’s dead,” Samia sings on ‘Dream Song’ and that fun fact is the whole spark here. Considering what those six minutes might be dedicated to and the hopes she hopes to bring into reality before her own six minutes arrive, this song is so simple and so effective as the music swell and soars in perfect correlation to the moving images.
That’s something Samia nails every time as her instrumentation always find a way to get right into a feeling and mirror it. She provides goosebumps every time but in the final moments, singing, “Are you scared to die? / The trick is don’t arrive / You can see it in your daughter’s eyes / That’s the purpose and the price,” as a reminder that life is for living and dreaming, it’s almost breathtaking.
‘Stellate’
As the opening track to her debut album finally gets its flowers, the entirety of that 2020 project deserves its moment in the sun. Sitting right at the centre, start with ‘Stelite’ as a truly underappreciated gem.
On every level, this is Samia at her best. Her voice is showing the full range, from rich velvety depths on the verses, to its angelic power in the repeating chorus of “you know it, but I can say it for you,” dancing around the simple admittance of ‘I love you’. Lyrically, too, it’s a Samia classic, built through a collage of niche memories and specific images that somehow become relatable when tied together in one emotional thread. Accompanied by a simple instrumental that’s both interesting enough but not overbearing, it’s moments like this on her debut that make it clear how crystal her vision was and how well the young artist already understood her power and how best to present it.
‘Charm You’
Love songs are all well and good, but how about a song for the exact opposite? Not heartbreak, no, but the desire to be utterly free and for once, to not be making connections and not be putting the work in to win people over. On ‘Charm You’, Samia sings about exactly that as she hopes, for once, to not make someone love her.
A true anthem for the commitment-phobic and the avoidant, ‘Charm You’ is half a celebration of untethered life and half a slightly fearful take on protecting yourself by rejecting connection as she sings “I don’t wanna charm anyone this time / I don’t wanna make anybody mine / Mostly, it’s just I don’t wanna end up cryin’ / I don’t wanna charm you,” over what is undeniably one of her most intoxicating instrumentals yet.
‘Kill Her Freak Out’
As the opening track from her second album, Honey, the moment ‘Kill Her Freak Out’ dropped, it was clear that a new era was here. Not only was this a step into something different instrumentally, peeling it all back to basically nothing to put the full spotlight on her lyrics, but the emotional brutality of this track is almost staggering as Samia admits to a past love, “I hope you marry the girl from your hometown / And I’ll fucking kill her / And I’ll fucking freak out.”
Full of feelings that range from tenderly loving to embarrassingly pathetic, from caring to outright murderous, she once again proves that the personal and specific can become universal. This is a song full of imagery that can only be plucked from her life, but the listener feels and understands every single second of it, pulled right to the heart of this complex emotional moment until it’s truly immersive. I’ve never heard this song and not felt it right in my chest as if I’m heartbroken too, and that’s a sure sign of greatness.
