Samia - Honey Tour

Bovine excision, a mysterious phenomenon involving the bloodless surgical removal of cattle organs, serves as the eerie inspiration for the opening track of Samia's third album, aptly titled Bloodless. Her voice flows through the evocative lyrics with ease, weaving through the gentle strum of a lone acoustic guitar. The quiet intimacy builds into a storm of sound, culminating in Samia's layered, ethereal harmonies that pierce with a haunting, macabre refrain: "And drained, drained bloodless." These emptied cattle evoke a grotesque vessel she unwittingly nurtured in an attempt to embody something both untouchable and on display, overflowing with infinite projections and capable of driving an unrelenting pursuit of the unattainable. Through sharp images—Diet Dr. Pepper and Raymond Carver as
parallel pursuits of minimalism, white underwear and leeches, a Degas dancer poised at the bannister—Samia examines a paradoxical existence where merit transforms into a calculated act of extraction ("I felt the pea, can I eat it?"). This is just one strand Samia weaves into the intricate tapestry of Bloodless.
Rich with layers that shift seamlessly from sparse folk to sweeping indie-pop epics, Bloodless explores Samia's relationship with a fragmented, symbolic version of Men—a patchwork of expectations and imagined standards she tried to meet, which ultimately shaped her sense of self. “I’ve spent the past two decades unintentionally conflating men with my understanding of God,” Samia explains. “The person I became in order to impress this imagined figure is inseparable from who I am today. With this album, I’ve tried to confront that head-on.”
Written & produced in both North Carolina and her new home of Minneapolis throughout 2024, Bloodless finds Samia reuniting with longtime-collaborator Caleb Wright and Jake Luppen for the highly-anticipated follow-up to 2023's revered Honey, which followed Samia's 2020's breakthrough debut The Baby. Across these thirteen songs, Samia grapples with the hollow form she once embodied — a vessel that gained value through its own absence, until playing dead became its own form of life. With Bloodless, she endeavors to disinter the self buried beneath these carefully constructed personas, ultimately reaching a place of acceptance for her whole, imperfect being.

Rebellious candour, existentialism, and friendship are at the crux of what drives and motivates songwriter, producer and artist duo Wynter Bethel and Tessa Mouzourakis. How the band came to be was a series of sliding doors moments and necessity, with both women 5000 miles apart during the pandemic and having their hearts broken, again and again. Bonding over literature and lyrical precision, the name Tommy Lefroy was born out of Jane Austen’s real life Mr Darcy - the original 19th-century fuckboy Thomas Langlois Lefroy - a man who broke the author's heart. The penny dropped when Tessa and Wynter thought: why can’t we be the strong female lead, and challenge literature’s traditional role of the male character: the heartbreaker? From meeting in Nashville in 2018 to continually crossing paths at house parties, when Tessa went to see Phoebe Bridgers’ supergroup Boy Genius play in her hometown Vancouver, she watched in awe and thought: “I want this, I can do this.” She posted a cover of their song “Ketchum, ID” on her Instagram story and Wynter responded: “Can we start a band?”. Both strong and “laughably existential” female characters in their own lives, and together, a musical powerhouse with an enduring soul connection, Tommy Lefroy moved to London and released their first single “Northern Towns” in 2021, followed by highly praised debut EP Flight Risk. Connecting with young female fans through perseverance, honesty, and lyrics that move you, make you cry and make you angry, the best friends have already won fans at NME, Apple and now have over 1 Million monthly listeners on Spotify. But seeing the tangible effect their music has had on fans this summer at live shows has blown Wynter and Tessa away, for a project that started over Zoom in a dark time when collective effervescence was taken away. With queues around the block for their performance at The Great Escape, Tommy Lefroy played their second London headline to a sold-out Lexington last month, with fans singing back every lyric from Flight Risk, and are set to perform at UK festivals this summer, including Barn On The Farm, Kendal Calling and Secret Garden Party. Built as an anchor to get them through the uncertainty of 2020, the project has felt like an act of rebellion, against the constraints and expectations they had of themselves, derived from societal expectations of what it means to be a woman, especially in music. Capturing care-not independence in their lyrics and a do-all approach to their creative process they find inspiration from unapologetic female storytellers like poet, Anne Carson, as well as Joni Mithcell, Patti Smith and Phoebe Bridgers, and creative contemporaries Sharon Van Etten, Samia & Haim. As multi-intrumentalists and producers, they excel in sonically experimenting with the details of the world around them - from samples of the tube in their new home-city of London, to friends mid-laughter and clinking glasses around the kitchen table. Uncompromising, beautifully honest, and refreshingly themselves, Tommy Lefroy is a perceptive voice for the malaise of modern living and an inspiration for the confident recklessness that comes with being a storyteller. The stories, written for each other, for their friends, and for the lovers who left, detail the storms of tearaway youth, stumbling in and out of love, and finding humour along the way.

Venus & the Flytraps is the indie-pop scene’s annoying little sister. Hailing from Nashville, they create playful and sharp music about love (or the lack of it), mommy issues, and the perils of growing up. Its core members are Ceci Tomé and Brenna Kassis, two best friends whose love for each other informs every musical step they take. Their sound is nostalgically influenced by the early 2000s music of their childhood. Venus & the Flytraps recently independently released their debut EP, Dumbing of Age, and are beginning production on their next project!