Samia’s saccharine sweet "Honey"
Graphic by Anya Perel-Arkin
By Sarah Fournell
On January 27th, Samia released her sophomore album Honey, which dives deep into the pits of despair and dances at the bottom. Tied together with hyper specific yet universally relatable melancholy, the Honey tracklist aurally oscillates at a feverish pace. The movement between trance-like ballads and folksy pop songs invoke auditory whiplash, creating an album as sonically unstable as the tumultuous emotions Samia captures lyrically. If it were ordered in a more cohesive manner, the album would have carried more weight as a whole. Samia’s songwriting remains hallmarked with an introspective–bordering on invasive–candor on Honey, with lyrics so deeply specific that they have the power to anthropomorphize entire tracks.
Beginning with an organ invoked stupor on “Kill Her Freak Out,” Samia ushers you into an elegy for lost loves, youthful exuberance, and a sense of becoming. With provokingly intimate lyrics, an ambient eeriness, and deadpan delivery of lines like “I hope you marry the girl from your hometown / And I'll fucking kill her / And I'll fucking freak out,” the opening track is an amuse-bouche of the album to follow — a taste of the darkly comedic, melancholic and wistful work of art.
Following with “Charm You,” Samia offers up some levity after the funeral march that is “Kill Her Freak Out.” A quaint folksy backdrop accompanies lyrics about not daring to enter into a relationship for fear of heartbreak. Despite verses full of cute anecdotes, ultimately the fear of “ending up crying” holds Samia back from charming anyone.
Samia once again dives into the deep end with “Pink Balloon,” a short but far from sweet piano ballad about a relationship that devolved into complicatedness far too quickly. So much so that it’s nearly impossible to continue to bear the weight of the relationship. Full of words that are painful to utter, “Pink Balloon” can best be summarized by the final line of the song, “How are you supposed to wanna love me anymore?”
Despite the sucker punch of the track before, Honey revs back up with “Mad at Me,” the standout pop anthem of the album. Even though the infectious rhythm makes it easy to dance to, the Rostam produced track is still emblematic of Samia’s sinister lyricism. Featuring a verse from Senegalese artist papa mbye, the track muses on the self-destructive nature of the question “Are you still / Mad at me?”
Once again taking a sharp turn down the rabbit hole of disparity and dissolution, “Sea Lions” is the sister to “Pink Balloon,” a different telling of the same relationship that was “too far gone.” The first half of the song is mournful, seemingly taking place after the fact, when the relationship is already dead and buried but still haunts Samia. It then evolves into a buzzing instrumental climax, flipping to the confrontational, borderline angry side of a dead relationship.
The next track, “To Me It Was” is a flashback to the sound she captured on her debut album The Baby, full of a country charm, embellished with a bluesy, twangy slide guitar, and allusions to classic country hits. The reflective, nostalgic lyrics feel like an incantation of self-reassurance, as if Samia is telling herself that even if things weren’t always great in hindsight, in the moment they were. It ends in a song sung by her grandmother, which she also featured on The Baby’s opening track “Pool.”
Followed by the most vulnerable song on the album, “Breathing Song” is a bone-chilling and raw ballad that displays Samia’s exceptional lyricism. Each verse serves as a vignette of a toxic relationship that budded from a non-consensual encounter dispersed between choruses of “No no no / No no no” that tell the story more bluntly. Each inflection of the word “no” in the chorus is sickeningly sadder than the last and sucks the air out of your lungs each time it’s sung. The intoxicating autotune that embellishes the chorus induces a painful fugue state of remembering. “Breathing Song” capstones in a frightening scream cut off by the opening notes of the saccharine sweet titular track “Honey.”
“Honey” is a nod to youthful exuberance and blissful ignorance within the artificial safe spaces you can create in your mind. It encapsulates a blithe numbness that suggests that fear and sadness don’t exist if you can’t feel anything at all! It’s unsettlingly whimsical and sunny, with dissociative lyrics that remind you, once again, that Samia is a masterful lyricist.
Slowing down yet again “Nanana” is a wistful lullaby, one of the few (slightly) emotionally secure songs on the album, shrouded with a sense of positivity inside and out. An ode to her “favorite friend” and all things wholesome, “Nanana” denies any inklings of relationship doubt, as previously approached with fear on “Charm You.” The track feels like a spiritual sequel to the Beatles’ “Across the Universe” with the same reverence for simplistic beauty in addition to their mirrored outros, with Samia’s “Nothing’s gonna change my mind” echoing The Beatles’ “Nothing’s gonna change my world.”
The penultimate track “Amelia” is a joyous celebration about the recording of Honey. With nods to the friends who helped her record the album such as Caleb Wright, Samia’s primary collaborator, and Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath, whose studio she recorded Honey in. The buzzy, warm track reflects the overwhelming excitement memorialized in the line “Oh my god there's nothing quite like doing / What you came to do.”
Honey ends on the same contemplative note it begins with in “Dream Song.” A peaceful guitar track guides you through Samia’s stream of consciousness musings on the world around her. The dreamy nature of the bridge has the sensation of a sunrise after a cold, dark night, serving as an optimistic note to culminate such a raw and painful album. Once again wildly specific in her one liners, Samia manages to bridge the gap between the personal and pervasive.
In a rollercoaster ride of emotional distress and sonic flux, Honey is a flourishing exhibition of Samia’s capabilities. Where the album lacks in order and flow, she makes up for in masterful lyricism and poignance. A magnificent showcase of her sensibilities, her sophomore work is that of an imminent superstar.