Samia: Honey review – blackly comic indie-rock confessionals

On her second album of raw, deliciously sad indie-rock, Nashville-based Samia constantly flits between blackly comic confessionals and excruciating bloodletting. Opener Kill Her Freak Out, underpinned by a funereal organ sigh, imagines her killing an ex’s new lover, the words delivered with a shrug of internet-speak irony. Moments later, however, she draws the listener back in: “Can I tell you something?” she sings, her voice close: “I’ve never felt so unworthy of loving.”

It’s a trick she plays throughout; constantly zooming in and out of tales of broken relationships, toxic behaviour and addiction in ways that feel diaristic and uncomfortably relatable. The delicate Pink Balloon juxtaposes a friend’s emotional turmoil with the 26-year-old’s increasingly desperate attempts to keep things light (“I’m tryna make you laugh / Sweating like an acrobat”), while Breathing Song describes a night out turned bad (“from the bar to the ER”), before its chorus of increasingly pained “no, no, no”s acts as a much-needed universal purging.

Musically, much like her 2020 debut, The Baby, Honey skews lo-fi, positioning Samia’s versatile voice front and centre over bruised synths (Nanana), or acoustic guitar (the country-folk lilt of To Me It Was). There are flashes of expanse, however. Rostam adds a sparse drum machine and shards of mutilated guitar to the inquisitive Mad at Me, while Sea Lions blossoms from plaintive organ to a sad club throb penetrated by snatches of discombobulating voicemail messages. Playful, painful and loaded with hooks that worm their way to the surface, Honey feels ripe for bleak midwinter wallowing.