Samia - The Bloodless Tour at the Academy of Music Theatre (Northampton, MA)

DSP Shows Presents:

Samia - The Bloodless Tour

w/ Raffaella

May 22, 2025

Academy of Music Theatre | Northampton, MA

Samia

samiaband.com

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.

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Raffaella

raff.world

On Raffaella’s debut project LIVE, RAFF, LOVE (co-written and produced by Jake Luppen of Hippo Campus), the New York City-bred singer/songwriter confronts and contorts the liminal space between adolescence and adulthood, creating a world with as much novelty as there is nostalgia.

The Minneapolis-based artist narrates with a specificity so intense you immediately absorb each sensory detail (the cotton candy and cigarette smoke, drunken kisses and stoned malaise). In following the shape of a play, LIVE, RAFF, LOVE’s Act II takes on a heavier tone. The result is a body of work establishing Raffaella as one of pop’s sharpest observers of human behavior, transforming her self-reflection into revelatory insight on the sublime chaos in coming-of-age.

Having previously opened for Misterwives, Bishop Briggs, Samia, Liz Phair and more – Raffaella brings her story to the forefront on her first-ever headline tour.

Listen to LIVE, RAFF, LOVE (Act II) out now.