SAMIA - Bloodless

I wanna be untouchable

I wanna be impossible

Songs without too many frills or mimicry of a time perhaps never lived firsthand: it's not a "dream", but what happens when you (once again!) peek into the boundless American catalogue of singer-songwriters who are engaged but not overly so, and who are, moreover, not very active on social media — a detail that's anything but trivial.

After the intriguing “The Baby” and the less focused “Honey”, Samia Najimy Finnerty, known simply as Samia – daughter of Dan from The Dan Band, an LA group with two albums to its name between 2007 and 2015 – returns with “Bloodless”, and this time she gets it right, fulfilling the dream hinted at above.

Samia first and foremost reclaims her own self from the abyss of relationships that are anything but clear, at times harmful, though underpinned by a very strong love – in other words, the kind many would call “toxic”, falling in line with today's increasingly reductive vocabulary. She explains it herself in these words: “Bloodless is about men, and about how a series of imaginary standards I tried to meet for them shaped my identity. The person I became to impress that fiction is inextricably tied to whoever I am. And with this record I tried to look her in the face.”

The Californian singer-songwriter thus tackles, across more or less all thirteen songs on “Bloodless”, her relationship with the men she's “crossed paths with” in her life so far, trying to get to the bottom of what they meant to her. It ranges from impossible demands, at times hard to fulfill, to broken mirrors after reflecting the wrong image of herself for far too long. The threshold of thirty is, after all, just around the corner for the twenty-nine-year-old.

Samia thus digs her fingers into all manner of wounds, crafting songs that alternate between straight-up American singer-songwriter fare and rock solutions that in the '90s would have delighted the directors and screenwriters of romantic films – above all “Bovine Excision”, which kicks off supreme with an instantly catchy chorus, amid leeches to be peeled off because they're stuck to underwear and teacups wrapped by cold hands.

There are also plenty of notable ballads, chief among them “Fair Game”, placed almost halfway through the album to suggest a state of mind both wounded by past mistakes and aware of a better future.

Boneless in the backyard

I bend well and suck hard

If a hickey is a trump card

It’s a reflex of a fair game

Even though she'll never get the “spilled blood” back, Samia sings of loves gone cold and never taken flight, exploring successful dream-pop patterns, never coated in that cloying, deviant sulphurous gloss, always suspended gracefully in a partly cloudy sky, thanks to a handful of chords that occasionally explode magnificently out of nowhere (“Carousel”). And when it's time to be left alone with a six-string and a glass of whiskey, perhaps sitting under a wooden porch, to sing her unease at full voice (“Proof”), Samia also slips admirably, for a moment, into the guise of a singer-songwriter from another era.

Produced by Caleb Wright & Jake Luppen, “Bloodless” won't have anyone shouting miracle. That much is clear. But it gives us the long-awaited maturity of a fine musician. An album to revisit several times a day, or on autumn nights.

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20/08/2025