Samia’s third studio album, Bloodless, is a gruesome, precise, and poetic act of self-surgery. Across 13 tracks built on complex tensions, the Minneapolis-based singer-songwriter dissects the performance of identity, the ache to be known, and the fear of being misunderstood. The result is often beautiful, but it doesn’t come easy. This is transformation by scalpel, told in songs that are messy, defiant, and unflinchingly honest.
Throughout Bloodless, Samia leans on metaphor as her sharpest tool for getting at the truth. On “Bovine Excision,” she picks leeches off of her underwear and meditates on bloodlessness as emptiness. “I wanna be untouchable/I wanna be impossible,” she sings. It’s emotional self-erasure in pursuit of an expectation that she knows she’ll never be able to meet.
On “Fair Game,” Samia likens herself to both a lighting bug, bright and beautiful, and a mosquito, invisible and bloodthirsty. The most traditional sounding of the album’s alt-country offerings, the track’s banjo-infused glow hides a deep, growling bass. “You can go outside on a hot night and clap, but you won’t get your blood back,” Samia warns—a reminder that some damage can’t be avoided or undone. (One imagines that it isn’t a warning that was heeded by her partner, who’s depicted on “Lizard” as a decapitated reptile trying to regrow its brain.)
With that in mind, Samia leans into volatility elsewhere. On the minimalist “Craziest Person,” she clings to chaos over shallow connection: “I’d rather be part of something awful than lie about having fun with you.” The stripped-down production mirrors that sentiment, trading polish for honesty and rejecting the kind of performance the album so often interrogates.
If Bloodless is self-surgery, “Spine Oil” is the incision—the point where she truly stops pretending everything’s fine. The deceptively sunny song pushes back against being underestimated, turning softness into defiance. “Do you wanna see the heavenly creature?” Samia asks in what is perhaps one of the prettiest threats ever put to record.
Elsewhere, “Carousel” zooms in on the thrill of getting to know someone new—the electric closeness of early romance—before burning it all down in a fiery climax of heavy guitars and drums, while the contemplative “Proof” finds her peering out over the ashes in search of some kind of closure. “And when you weren’t there, I made out of thin air what would bear resemblance to proof,” she sings on the latter, confronting the uncomfortable truth that it’s sometimes easier to lie to yourself than accept the person you loved never really saw you at all.
Bloodless ends with a final act of exposure: “I got nothing under these Levi’s,” Samia admits on “Pants,” stripped of metaphor, defense, everything. The track’s multipart structure, anchored by an interlocking bassline and vocal, feels like a hard-earned resolution: dirty but complete. In the end, Bloodless doesn’t try to clean up the mess—it just lays it bare.
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