Samia’s fight against the impossible ideal

There have been cases upon cases over the years, evidence continuing to pile up. Believers try to find patterns between the cases, using them as evidence of the otherworldly. Some even say they’ve found bioluminescence under the skin of the cow carcass. Some have drawn maps of the excision sites aligned with those of UFO flight patterns. Others – perhaps the more sane among us – have dismissed this all as a hoax and a conspiracy. In any case, a brush with bovine excision is like a brush with the impossible, the unexplainable, and maybe even the divine. People who get into it really get into it. It’s an obsession.

Samia Finnerty – who releases mononymously as Samia – first heard about all of this on a date a few years ago. The romance wasn’t meant to be – good luck to anyone who opens with bovine excision, although maybe I’m being harsh – but the ideas stuck. Now, years into her music career and her coming of age, Finnerty’s finally figured out why. Bloodless, her third full-length album, takes its name and its themes from the sad and strange circumstances of those cows. It’s a manifesto and a manifestation, using an impossible happenstance to explain the burdens of feeling impossible herself.

“That cow is so celebrated and so exciting to people,” Finnerty tells me. We’re unpacking all of this on a frigid but bright day in Brooklyn. Both she and I have been schlepping our bags around the city, racing to meetings and shoots and flights. But for an hour in a warm cafe, we’re entirely locked in – her articulation of her project and herself so compelling it’s all encompassing. “And so, you know, you want to be this thing that nobody understands.”

“I’d been thinking about unsolved mysteries with this album, because I was thinking about my experience with womanhood and realizing that the ideal woman is an unsolved mystery,” Finnerty explains. “The standards are impossible. Because, when I was on this date and he told me all about bovine excision, he also told me that I was his dream girl.”

At the time of our conversation, Finnerty is a few months away from Bloodless’s release. She hasn’t done an album campaign since 2023, and the demands of the promotion cycle are starting to pile up. That feeling, she tells me, can be really scary. The ‘fame’ element of music-making was never what drew her to it in the first place. The way she makes it sound, it was more a compulsion that wormed its way into becoming a career. And yet, despite staring down many of the same fears she faced before the release of prior projects, she explains that this time feels different – in a good way.

“I feel a lot more grounded this time,” she says. And I can tell she means it. “I’ve done a lot to try to protect my peace. I don’t have social media apps on my phone unless I need to post. I don’t look at stuff or read stuff. … With that, you can get addicted to the positive feedback, and you can get addicted to the negative feedback. Then, it starts to dictate the way you see yourself.”

It also helps, she says, that she’s tried to center taking care of herself in ways she hasn’t before. “I’ve tried to live my real, actual life in the real world and let this be a fun addition to that,” she tells me. “You can’t control everything. But I’m trying to control the small areas I can.” Things like working out, sleeping well, eating well have all coalesced as parts of her attempt to find a sustainable rhythm. And it helps, of course, that the impetus for this album came from that mindset shift as well.

There are some albums that are like tapestries, coming together with little threads of experience pulled from the heres and theres of a life. There are others that are predestined and necessary, that get made to wrestle something to the ground or to move through an era with purpose and poise. Bloodless is one of the latter. It’s been in the making officially since March of 2023, but its roots extend much farther.

For Finnerty, songwriting has always been a form of therapy. “I started writing because I was angsty and upset as a pre-teen. It was a puberty outlet, and that’s how I learned to process my feelings,” she explains. That tone earned her a cult following and critical acclaim. Audiences came to love her cutting, honest, and masterful vignettes. Her debut, The Baby, now sits in the indie coming-of-age canon; the follow up, Honey, a formidable companion. But if those first two records saw an adolescent become an adult, Bloodless sees an adult become themself.

Born in Los Angeles and later moving to New York, Finnerty spent many of her formative years in and around the industry. Her parents were part of the Hollywood set, a scene that she’s said felt disenfranchising early on. Though she was inspired by and devoted to her parents, her draw to life as a musician didn’t come from a desire to entertain – that part of the job, she says, has never come naturally to her – but rather a desire to write.

Early English courses instilled in Finnerty an interest in poetry and narrative. Her sixth grade teacher, she says, was the right balance of encouraging and critical, showing her how to love the craft and how to want to perfect it. “I’ve always loved poetry, probably more than singing,” Finnerty says. In her own personal pantheon sits the likes of Billy Collins, Anne Sexton, and Maya Angelou.

Finnerty’s songs are bathed in these influences. They flow more like Romantic poems than pieces of contemporary music, largely because, she explains, that’s how they start. When ideas strike, she’ll stream-of-consciousness write long poems just to capture the feelings mid air. She’ll then send these as voice notes to her best friend and neighbour and collaborator Raffaella – the pair “share a brain” – who often helps her distill them down lyrically to the versions that appear on the records. Only after she’s got a tight message does she begin trying to find a melody for it.

Since The Baby, Finnerty has found herself writing and recording around a consistent cast of characters: Jake Luppen, Caleb Wright, and Raffaella Meloni. They got connected when she was on tour with Luppen’s band Hippo Campus, and the partnership – both personal and professional – grew from there. This trio is one of the most exciting working in the indie world today, propping up acts whose influence extends across the hubs of New York and Los Angeles and Nashville and the criss-cross of heartland in between. Luppen and Meloni live together in Minnesota, and last December, Finnerty decided to join them.

After bopping around each of America’s major music centres, Finnerty needed a change. The scene, understandably, gets exhausting. And, there’s something to be said for living a stone’s throw from both your best friends and your business partners. “I usually work out of Minneapolis and have for a long time. It’s the place I feel most comfortable,” Finnerty tells me. “I don’t miss the big cities. It’s fun to try that on for short periods of time. But I get overwhelmed.”

If her life out in the Midwest with her best couple friends sounds idyllic, that’s because it kind of is. It's a textbook chosen family – the home away from home we all need and crave. Bloodless’s penultimate track, “North Poles,” is even dedicated to immortalising it, a euphoric and liberating portrait of the deep well of friendship that runs between Finnerty and Meloni, specifically. Finnerty sings of knowing someone better than she knows herself, sticking together like magnets always meant to find each other, fighting in ways that will never be fatal because you’re too similar to not. Nestled in the fade out of an album about feeling empty, “North Poles” is refreshingly full.

“She has taught me so much about how to speak my mind and know that no one’s gonna leave,” Finnerty says. “She’s been one of the people in my life who is like: ‘I’m not gonna leave.’”

Occasionally intermixed with this tight-knit core is folk phenom Christian Lee Hutson, who Finnerty affectionately says she “bullied” into being her friend. “I can’t remember how we met initially. Probably just in L.A. through mutual friends. But I’ve been a fan of his for years,” she tells me. Hutson’s lyrical imprints are easy enough to spot – it’s no surprise that he’s credited on a track that opens “Diet Dr. Pepper, Raymond Carter” – complimenting Finnerty’s already razor-sharp instincts in all the right ways. “He’s another person I’ll write with over text,” Finnerty explains. “I don’t even think he knew he wrote on this album until it was done.”

For a record like Bloodless, having this creative circle of trust was instrumental. It always has been, but perhaps on no album more so than this one. “It happened at a pretty dark time in my head. Just a difficult year. And, unfortunately, that’s so great for writing for me,” she says of starting to write for the record. A lot of her writing is the product of strife, another habit she says she’s trying to shake. Honey had just been released – an album she says had actually been fun for her to make – and yet she had more to get off her chest.

“So many of my favourite artists are like: ‘You don’t have to struggle!’ And I’m really trying with that. Maybe on the next record,” she says, half earnest and half throwaway joke. In some ways, writing makes pain feel productive, she explains. Rather than wallowing, bad situations become something to write about. And after the writing can also come personal growth.

Album-mode for Finnerty is all encompassing. She’s the type, she says, to pull her hair out over every word, flicking through each song line by line to make sure she’s saying exactly what she means at every turn. Early on in the Bloodless process, she adopted an intensive writing routine, treating it like a nine-to-five and not allowing herself to stop writing until the end of her workday. Every day, for a month, she’d sit down for hours on end and not let herself stop. “It was pretty torturous, but I think it actually helped a lot,” she says. “I’d do it again.”

Her supplementary reading diet – in addition to Butler – included Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Roxanne Gay, Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, and Andrea Dworkin. She searched their texts like scriptures, explaining her journey as an endless seeking that she thought might make her feel whole. I follow up on this and ask if she’s religious at all – the album’s spiritual and metaphysical otherworldly underpinnings might lend themselves to theological interpretation. I wonder also about this connection she’s described wanting with some greater purpose or path or meaning. She shakes her head no. She reiterates: “But, I’m a seeker.”

Bloodless itself oscillates between emptiness and completeness. If “North Poles” is two halves joining together in a chaotically perfect union, “Hole In A Frame” is its foil, exploring what’s left when there isn’t even a singular whole but a celebrated lack thereof. Inspired by a framed hole that Sid Vicious punched in the wall of Cain’s Ballroom in Tulsa, Finnerty mythologizes emptiness. Or, more accurately, riffs off a famously already-immortalised emptiness. “When I was trying to write about being complicit in my own emptiness and trying to be as barely there as possible, I was like: Oh, I feel like a framed whole. A framed absence. It’s like a celebrated thing that’s gone,” she says. The song was the last track she wrote for the record, and it’s maybe the most complete articulation of the concepts she was trying to parse through at the time.

“I think with this album, I tried to let myself be angry,” Finnerty continues. To date, much of her catalogue has leaned unfettered into sadness, making her a standard bearer for the somewhat patronisingly-titled ‘sad girl’ genre. Sadness, especially for women, is often more palatable, easier to accept for listeners and critics. But writing anger – allowing yourself to feel it – requires coming to the table from a place of strength, one that’s often harder to tap into and one that’s also often discouraged. Bloodless, for Finnerty, was about unshackling herself from those ideological chains.

“I have this thing where I won’t get angry unless it could be justified in a court of law,” she tells me. “I go through the whole thing in my brain and I measure everyone else’s opinions and I won’t open my mouth until I’m absolutely certain I’m right. But with this one, I tried to let some things fly. And I listened to a lot of Fiona Apple, so that helps.”

In the end, after grappling with it all, she arrived at acceptance. The record’s closer, “Pants,” isn’t some triumphant overcoming but instead a higher form of self-understanding. This, Finnerty tells me, proved to be all she really needed in the first place. “I’m always going to be a little bit all of these behaviours,” she says. “I think all you can really do is look at it and try to have awareness.”

As she wrote, Luppen helped her bring her visions to life in studios across Minnesota and North Carolina. In Minnesota, their space was set up in a distillery, which Finnerty says gave her a constant headache that helped motivate her to actually finish the record. She’s the type, she tells me, to spend months tweaking, often coming back to songs months later when she’s finally processed the events they’re about. While this gives her writing expansive perspective, it’s not always helpful for knowing when to put the pen down. That’s where the alcohol-smell-induced daze stepped in. Intermixed with those sessions were trips down to North Carolina, where Wright recently moved with his family. There, they stayed a Betty’s, a studio space built by Sylvan Esso in the woods near Chapel Hill.

“I think we really figured out what the album was in North Carolina,” she says of one of the early pilgrimages out there for Bloodless. “We did a bunch of mushrooms and figured out the North Star.”

Sonically, Bloodless escapes genre. For every finger-picked guitar there’s a whirring synth, autotuned vocal embellishment, or blissed-out drum. If there’s any production throughline, Finnerty tells me, it would just be “eerie.”

“I hate genres,” Finnerty says. “It feels really restrictive. So, I like trying to push that a bit. And working with Jake and Caleb, their palettes are so complicated and even contradict each other, so it’s fun to see what that creates.”

Now, Finnerty tells me, all that’s left to do is share those little introspections with everyone else. For a record so personal, I ask her how it might feel to have others imprint their own interpretations on her very real revelations. That, she tells me, is actually one of the best parts. What she may find tiring about promotion she finds fulfilling on tour and in real-time exchanges with listeners. It’s like the part of a good party, she says, where all the posers are gone and the night turns into an intimate circle exchanging secrets. And isn’t that really the part we’re all after?

“I love having a mutualistic exchange with people … I live for that, but I’d rather do it in person,” she says. “I write really specifically, but I know I’ve seen myself in other people’s specificity. So I hope people can do some of that here, too.”