Blood On The Silver Screen and cosplaying as a pop star “>
Miriam Marlene
SASAMI never thought she would make a pop album. “Like a lot of kids who came up in an indie or alt or punk scene I didn’t really feel represented by mainstream pop culture growing up,” she says on a Zoom call as she overlooks the ocean from her Northern Californian home. Pop was something she would hear at the mall or a dance, uninvited but not unwelcome. As a teen she was more interested in Elliott Smith and System of a Down, influences that bled into her first two albums: 2019’s SASAMI and Squeeze, released in 2022. Those projects introduced SASAMI first as a sensitive and melancholic shoegazer and then an artist writing about loneliness through a distorted nu-metal filter.
It wasn’t until she ended up supporting old school friends HAIM on tour (or “scaring Midwesterners by covering ‘Toxicity,’” as she puts it) that the idea of making pop music crossed her mind. The result is Blood On The Silver Screen, her Rostam-produced and Clairo-featuring widescreen new studio album. As a classically trained musician, SASAMI’s study of pop songwriting is precise and impeccable,with songs that swoop and soar in all the right places. Her heart-swelling anthems share DNA with her older music but with new and bold structures that would have teams of Swedish songwriters nodding in approval.
“Getting older I realized that there were a lot of situations where I actually enjoyed hearing pop music,” she says, now far removed from her days as a genre-purist teen. In fact, she’s become something of a pop advocate. “On tour you’re just mainlining Lady Gaga and Rihanna to keep the vibes up to. I’ll be working out and pop music will be really motivating or I’ll be at karaoke with friends and having a super cathartic moment screaming Kelly Clarkson lyrics. The feeling of empowerment and uplift in pop music is something I find really exciting because my music is mostly depressing or violent.”
Ahead, we spoke to SASAMI about working with collaborators Clairo and Rostam, how her metal album almost ruined her voice, and the paranormal backstory to the album’s visuals
THE FADER: When did you realize that your third album would be a pop album?
SASAMI: Touring one album is a precursor for the next album for me. Touring Squeeze with a metal band meant I trashed my body and my voice. I was headbutting bandmates and screaming every night. I’m not a professional metal vocalist so I wasn’t screaming with good metal technique. I’m screaming bloody murder, which you can only do for so long before your body’s like, “Bitch. you’re not dying. But you are going to if you keep doing this.” By the end of touring I knew I had to honor my voice as an instrument and not destroy it. I wanted the new songs to have vocals at the forefront of the album and to focus on songcraft. My goal quickly became to understand pop songwriting as much as I could.
One of the standout tracks on the album is “In Love With a Memory,” which features Clairo. What was it about her that made her the ideal collaborator for that song?
There came a point where the narrative [of the song] became very ambiguous, with one person choosing between staying and trying to fight for a relationship that had really flourished in the past and the other road being the unknown and moving on to the future.
Eventually I realized the story didn’t belong to just one person, but both sides of the relationship. I wanted a collaborator that had a voice that was kind of similar to mine, but had its own kind of spirit. Clairo has that timeless voice where she can sing any genre and it sounds like her, she has a movement to the melodies she sings. I was very lucky that Rostam, who co-produced the song, produced Claire’s first album. So she was already part of my musical family
How did you come to work with and collaborate with Rostam?
I am good friends with the HAIM sisters and during the pandemic I was about to sub for Alana while she filmed Licorice Pizza. So I was in rehearsals with HAIM and Rostam, who produced a lot of Women in Music Pt. III that we were going to tour. I knew for Blood On The Silver Screen that I wanted to work with people who were good at bridging rock and pop, and he was the obvious choice.
Have you played the new album for HAIM?
Not anything specific, but I definitely would say that they were a huge inspiration on the record. They have all these amazing references in their music but they’re so singular in their sound, which is something I think a lot about with pop music. The best pop artists can almost be parodied because their sound is so distinct, and that’s something I’m still really working on and struggle with all the time.
On “Slugger” you reference turning 30 and how your life feels different. Have you found that writing lyrics has changed as you’ve gotten a little bit older?
It’s a weird thing because making an album is such a long process. Over the last ten years or so I have only made three albums. And obviously you change so much over that period of time. I was talking to my friend who’s a winemaker and they’re putting out cuvées every couple months but for me it’s every three years. That’s why there are such big shifts between albums, because I am kind of ADHD and I need to be stimulated by what I’m doing. That usually means doing something really different. Obviously I had a lot of personal experiences between my late twenties and my early thirties. That’s, like, a big pivotal moment, I think, for a lot of people. I am much more focused on storytelling now than I was in the past.
Obviously, image and visuals are as big a part of the pop world as the music. Can you explain a little about the character you’re embodying on the album cover and in the music videos?
For me to feel like I’m not just selling a product there has to be an element of world building, because that feeds me. To me, this is all performance art. I’m just a music nerd living by the ocean in Northern California. Right now, I’m wearing full fleece from head to toe. I don’t wake up and feel like a pop star. It’s a costume that I put on.
I worked with [creative director] Andrew Thomas Huang and we built this denim-clad alien creature that has arrived on Earth and is cosplaying as an American. She has curly hair and wears denim and boots but her big goal is to understand the concept of love. At the same time love is this shape-shifting character itself where we were thinking about sex without attachment, historical versions of love, like, a version of love where you demolish someone and get demolished yourself. So I’m this alien who is learning about all these different relationships.
It’s important to have these details. It’s like going to a restaurant and the spaghetti is good, but you don’t know the nonna who brought the tomatoes from Sicily. You know what I mean? Everything that’s good has a lore.
