Since the release of her 2020 debut, The Baby, Samia has made a name for herself as a songwriter with a raw style and intimate feel, capturing the heartbreak, humor, and chaos of young adulthood. Her 2023 sophomore album, Honey, expanded on that honesty, layering in darker comedic themes to songs that felt both personal and relatable.

With the release of her third album, Bloodless, Samia raises the bar yet again. Across 13 tracks, she examines identity, longing, fantasy, and the brutal need to be known. It’s messy, beautiful, catchy, and sometimes intentionally uncomfortable. It is an album that thrives on tension and contradictions.

From the opening moments of Bloodless, it’s clear Samia is taking her lyrics to a more vulnerable space while pushing her sound in new directions. On “Bovine Excision,” the first single to drop, her use of imagery here is striking, with lines about picking leeches off her underwear pairing the grotesque with the deeply personal. The title references the mysterious phenomenon of cattle being killed and mutilated without any blood loss. In an interview with Rolling Stone, Samia explained, “I was drawn to the phenomenon of bloodless cattle mutilation as a metaphor for self-extraction, this clinical pursuit of emptiness.” It’s a chilling metaphor for emotional self-erasure: the desire to be empty, untouchable, and impossible to hurt. 

Throughout the album, metaphors serve as her most thoughtful tool for self-examination. On “Fair Game,” she compares herself to both a luminous lightning bug and a bloodthirsty mosquito, layering a seemingly warm alt-country sound with a darker undertone. “You can go outside on a hot night and clap, but you won’t get your blood back,” she warns, a vivid reminder that some wounds are permanent.

But Bloodless isn’t just a step forward lyrically, it’s a musical leap forward as well. The album feels grand and textured, even in its starkest moments. Songs like “Proof” strip things back to just Samia’s voice and a finger-picked guitar, while others like “Carousel” build into a thundering storm of guitars and drums, capturing the rush and collapse of new love with stunning intensity. Meanwhile, “Pants” shapeshifts across genres, moving from a melancholy indie feel to experimental fragments, all while anchoring its emotional core.

Even with all its expansive ideas and sonic shifts, Bloodless holds together beautifully. Its ambitions never take away from the intimacy we expect from Samia; instead, they heighten it. Samia’s talent for capturing the idealized image of people, the gaps we leave for others to fill, is a common theme throughout the album. Nowhere is this more prominent than on “Hole In A Frame,” where she reflects on a framed hole Sid Vicious once punched into a bar wall in Tulsa. The image becomes a meditation on absence, destruction, and how meaning sometimes grows in spaces where things and people are broken.

As Bloodless draws to a close, Samia peels back her last layers. On “Pants,” she confesses, “I got nothing under these Levi’s,” clearing the metaphors and the armor. It’s a hard-won, honest ending to an album that doesn’t pretend healing is clean or easy; instead, it simply lays the messiness out there for all to see.

Bloodless proves that Samia isn’t just a great songwriter, but she’s also one of the most fearless voices in music. Vulnerable, volatile, and often breathtaking, her third album cements her place as an artist.

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