The cover of every Samia album so far has seen its auteur obscuring herself more and more from the camera lens. On 2020's The Baby, she's centred in the frame, but avoiding eye contact; on 2023's Honey, she's further away, awash in blue lens flares and still not meeting our gaze.
Fittingly, all of the colour is drained from the artwork for Bloodless, with a grainy greyscale Samia at an even greater distance, retinas reflecting the flash, looking down while bent over.
This is all worth noting, because as these perspectives of her image on the cover have changed, her music has changed alongside them. Perhaps this is observed most presciently in not the soundscapes themselves, but the way Samia presents herself in her writing, angling the frame of reference to account for more points of view than the insular first-person singular.
For as much as the singer-songwriter has an undeniable knack for melodic hooks that permeate throughout the different shades of her alt-pop permutations, it's her lyricism that I've always found most compelling. "Diet Dr. Pepper / Raymond Carver," are the first words she sings on this album, as lead single "Bovine Excision" swings to match the gory logophilic satisfaction of its title. "Hole in a Frame," meanwhile, paints a picture of that bathroom wall Sid Vicious punched through before coming to the album's lyrical centrepiece: "A little death goes a long away."
On "Lizard," Samia sees herself being made the wall, trying to remain present at a party, with someone she used to know threatening to make a scene: "I'm worth my weight in your image / Dancing to something sweet." That image of her — other people's perceptions — have always haunted her work, but near the end of Bloodless, on "Proof," Samia takes control of the narrative. As she confronts being loved "like a child's toy or cigarette" atop the descent of a warm yet aloof finger-plucked acoustic guitar line, she's at her most powerfully direct and poetically impact.
"You don't know me, bitch," Samia repeats, delivering the mantra with conviction, but without haughtiness, betraying the fact that her voice would have once shaken around the words. It might not be her most clever turn of phrase or remarkably tattoo-worthy remark, but it might be among her most effective, time-stopping moments on record. It makes the central question of the following track, "North Poles," ring all the more clear: if you see yourself in someone, how can you look at them?