Samia Faces Down the Monster

S
tep into Samia’s fantasy world and you’ll find an alter ego that looks like her, but is entirely different. She wears a backward baseball cap on top of her long, curly, jet-black hair and sports denim Daisy Dukes. She lives in a balmy, emerald-green wetland. She’s completely unburdened by people’s opinions or expectations. This is Samia’s idealized self, and her name is Kiki Swamp.

As she shares her alter ego’s name, Samia, 28, can’t help but laugh. “I made a Sim of her,” the singer-songwriter says with a chuckle. “It’s like the most confident version of myself.”

Samia is worlds away from her daydream as she sits at a corner table at the Grand Central Oyster Bar in Manhattan. It’s mid-­February, and a blanket of snow covers New York. This version of Samia describes herself as “a pretty naturally shy person,” as she picks apart her straw wrapper and fiddles with the gold rings on her fingers. She sips on an iced tea with a plate of french fries in front of her; she’s too nervous to try an oyster for the first time. (“What if it went poorly, and then it was documented forever?” Fair enough.) Throughout the conversation, she often says she feels like a child. It’s a funny comparison when you consider the very un-childlike music she makes, pairing seething lyrics with potent melodies, or her killer outfit: an elegant, dark-brown fur coat thrown over a black minidress paired with platform loafers. 

Samia may not be in the Kiki Swamp uniform, but as she gears up to release her third album, Bloodless, she’s closer to that idealized self than ever before. That’s not to say her first two albums, 2020’s The Baby and 2023’s Honey, lacked confidence. Those records showed off her superpower: sharp songwriting with incisive details about heartbreak and twentysomething life (“I hope you marry the girl from your hometown/And I’ll fucking kill her”). It’s a skill she’d been honing since around 2017, when she first started playing open mics in New York. Samia quickly found an audience back then, connecting with fans who could picture her vivid imagery and see their own experiences reflected back at them.

For Bloodless, Samia realized she had to turn away from the need for outside approval. “It doesn’t come naturally for me. I’m not one of those people who’s like, ‘Fuck what you think,’” she says. “I was really on a mission to shed that part of myself, because I thought, ‘The only way I’ll ever be happy is if I learn to believe in my choices and ideas.’”

Since this past December, Samia has lived in Minneapolis with her boyfriend and fellow musician Briston Maroney. Before that, the couple spent time in Los Angeles, where she was born to actor parents Kathy Najimy and Dan Finnerty, and in Nashville, where Maroney was based. But she says the new album’s Americana feel and folk-pop leanings came into focus on a pivotal recording trip that she took in August 2023 to western North Carolina. “I think the spirit of it was born there,” she says. “That’s when I sort of understood what I was trying to say.”

Samia had begun formulating the poems that would become Bloodless earlier that year, starting with a concept revolving around historical muses like Kiki de Montparnasse, an early-20th-century artist’s model for surrealist painter Man Ray and others. But she found herself changing course to write about how she, herself, was perceived by the world. 

 It started with the party Samia sings about on “Lizard” — a night that was ruined by the presence of a “no-contact person in my life,” she says. “We had a conversation to try to remedy the situation, and the next day, we had to go to a party together with all of our mutual friends, mostly his friends, and it was horrible.”

Samia says that painful encounter helped her tap into one of the new album’s central themes. “When you don’t talk things through, there’s just a lot of fantasy being created,” she says. “I was feeling the consequences of being made into a fantasy and not being able to have a chance to explain myself and be a human being.” She felt like a mythologized monster, and it pissed her off. 

Samia soon realized her frustration extended beyond that specific conflict. “I started thinking about my experience with womanhood on a larger scale,” she says. “I had so much shame about being worried about men and maybe having altered myself in some way because of it.” 

That’s a theme she’s been working through for years: Some of her earliest singles, like “Someone Tell the Boys” and “Lasting Friend,” boldly called out mansplainers and handsy young men, cementing the singer-songwriter as a feminist voice.

As she continued writing Bloodless, Samia saw how universal her feelings were, and how often women have to shape and contort themselves to appease men. “Even if you don’t like boys, you just have to make men not kill you,” she says. “You have to appeal to men in some way.” Samia makes sure to clarify that she’s not talking about one man in her life: “I keep calling it this conglomerate, patchwork, abstract idea of a man.” 

Throughout the LP, Samia deals with the horrific realities of a patriarchal society by poking fun at the unattainable expectations put on women. “Picking leeches off white underwear … I want to be impossible,” she sings on the lead single, “Bovine Excision,” subverting the idea of virginity by claiming she’s so incredibly, unrealistically pure that even leeches sucking on her skin wouldn’t draw a drop of blood.

 On album highlight “Hole in a Frame,” Samia finds there can be power in being an empty vessel for other people’s ideas of what you represent, using a piece of music history as a metaphor: the framed spot in Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma, where Sid Vicious punched a hole in the wall in 1978. “It was just the most perfect fucking metaphor … the frame around nothing,” she says. “It was this absence that he created.”

The six-minute spiral of an album closer, “Pants,” explores a similar idea as Samia contends with her identity. “Who was I when I bought these pants?/They’re nonrefundable/Now I’m questioning everything I am,” she sings breathlessly over a steady drumbeat before the track transforms into a moody meditation. “Wanna see what’s under these Levi’s?/I got nothing under these Levi’s,” Samia repeatedly taunts as the song ends. Get it? “There’s no woman under the pants,” she tells me, laughing. 

There’s relief and joy in that absurd moment. As she releases not just her most personal album, but also her most ferocious one, and stakes a claim in a new, Midwest city, Samia is free to shape whoever she wants to be. “Maybe I’m just all of these things,” she says. “Whatever I started with is there somewhere, and then all these little things that have attached themselves to me are there.”

She leans her head against the wood-paneled wall of the restaurant as she considers this possibility and all that it implies: “Maybe there’s no inherent self. The thing that I’ve been so desperately looking for to reconnect with, it might not be there — and that’s fine. That’s kind of exciting.”