album review: How Samia’s The Baby reminds me of being sad without a reason to be sad

If I could choose where it happened, I would build bold, towering monuments at every site. Years later I would visit each one, and press my tongue to the gold rounding each curve to make sure they were real. I wish it happened somewhere old, quiet, in between book stacks with a sweet old lady at the register. Or with my toes dipped in a lily pond, begging the fish to take a bite. I imagine some sort of grotto, with exotic plants and footprints in the mud. But my touchstones for memory are mundane. I got my first period at a nail salon in the mall--not the fancy mall with designer stores, the mall that smelled of fry-oil and hair dye. I spent my free time after school getting Starbucks with my nerdy friends, sometimes we got frozen yogurt, too. I played pretend and sang hymns in a gymnasium-turned-Catholic church every week for ten years. The places where I feel the most grounded, the most connected to who I am, are fodder for a 2013 Lorde song. My ode to personal history includes frappuccinos, fluorescent lighting and the aching wood of church pews. And still, it soothes. Still, I find myself wanting to whisper, “Momma,” to the woman wearing a headset at the In-N-Out drive-thru. I stop in my tracks and sit criss-cross on concrete when I pass by a church of any denomination while I’m walking to the store. I relish in the voyeurism of my past self, my expired sadness.

Samia’s debut album, The Baby (2020), utilizes late 90s alternative and early 2000s indie-pop aesthetics to tell stories of love, heartache, confidence, and insecurity in a narrative tone that altogether feels like watching a VHS-tape of home videos you randomly picked up at Goodwill. It feels like the monument Samia built to her early adulthood so that maybe an older version of herself has some external scaffolding more special than a fast-food chain to hold her memories in. The Baby’s first track, “Pool”, is immediately intimate by opening with audio of Samia’s grandmother chanting sweet-somethings to her in Arabic. The pop-rock guitar riff on “Fit N Full” sounds like it could soundtrack an early career Lindsay Lohan feature film. “Limbo Bitch” could follow a Third Eye Blind track in the credits of a Season 3 episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I want to exist in that essentially youthful liminal space, between innocence and jadedness. Like an indie Michelle Branch, Samia’s voice throughout the project has the dewey emotive quality of a high school arts teacher. Her pedestrian confessions–“I got bug bites on my legs”–are so touchingly tousled in between those that crack her ego open: “I will stand in for an older me if you say, ‘I trust you’.” The relationship between her performed naïveté and heavy, ardent revelations generates a sonic landscape for early adulthood by gracefully piecing together emotions borne of late adolescence with those earned through experience.

The Baby gushes over falling in love like it’s the subject of a new Psychology Today article, and explores self-worth and diffidence with self-referential coyness. On “Minnesota”, Samia sings about the helpless desire to follow her lover and live in their world. On “Stellate,” she relishes in all the simple pleasures she wants with them, insisting, “You know it / but I can say it for you.” On “Fit N Full”, Samia boasts a desperate ego that gives itself fully to its subject: “ Only getting hotter as I sweat / I have never really been upset / Just hollow and amazing”. She playfully describes her confidence as predicated on her lover’s desire and opportunity to project onto her. There is a tension on this album that exists between her adept poetic observations and narrative interludes that feel earned (“Triptych”, “Winnebago”, “Waverly”, “Stellate”, “Big Wheel”) and the undercurrent of unprocessed confessions (“Fit N Full”, “Limbo Bitch”, “Does Not Heal”, “Is There Something In the Movies?”). Herein lies the metaphor I can't help but explore... the baby: learning, yearning, explicitly emoting. Crying, laughing, asking to be held and eager to understand the world they live in. Samia is both explicit and withholding, sometimes crawling away from pain and often walking towards joy.

The last time I felt this way about somebody-who's-younger-than-me's debut indie album, I was a teenager and I was sad for no reason and it was Lorde (duh). Lorde’s Pure Heroine (2013) was special in its groundedness, authenticity, and the specific story of youth it told with language and music that transcended its age. My community (almost-outcast artsy suburban kids) and I connected deeply to that record and I was left feeling awestruck and jealous by its wisdom. Eight years later, Samia's The Baby feels like an older sister of Pure Heroine. Of course, Lorde’s sophomore project Melodrama (2017) was a naturally beautiful progression from her debut. That being said, I see The Baby as not a follow-up but a parallel project, as if its author moved out of the suburbs and into the city, twenty-something instead of something-teen. I look forward to holding onto this album, this relic of Samia’s young adult life, as a keychain souvenir of mine.