On her first full-length, the singer-songwriter navigates the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, poetic writing and a sardonically sunny indie-rock sound.
Everyone and no one is “baby.” You call people “baby” when you love them, or when you’re infantilizing yourself via internet meme. For Gen Z, cutesy self-identification as “baby” softens a harsh reality of coming of age in a time where everything is too much or too little—too much pollution, too few jobs, too much debt. Twenty-three-year-old Samia Finnerty’s debut album The Baby deals with “too much” in elegant ways, navigating the trappings of young adulthood with subtle, reflective songwriting and poetic lyrical beauty.
The Baby is technically Samia’s first full-length project, but she’s been entrenched in the entertainment industry for a while. Her parents are the actors Kathy Najimy and Dan Finnerty, and Samia has been acting and pursuing music for most of her life. When she was 17 and living in New York, she made a fake manager’s email address to help her book shows. On the painful “Is There Something in the Movies?,” she observes the industry as if she’s somewhat removed from it, sing-shrieking “Everyone dies/But they shouldn’t die young/Anyway, you’re invited to set” over a plaintive acoustic guitar.
Like Grand Jury labelmates Hippo Campus and Twin Peaks, Samia favors a sardonically sunny indie rock sound, good for driving in circles around your old high school and thinking about how different you look now. But she sets herself apart with her voice, which is where the truly exciting things happen. It’s dark and smooth like a melted caramel, and she sets it at the forefront of her songs, which are sparse aside from a guitar, a drum set, and occasional airy synth or keyboard. The flexibility of her tone allows her to explore a wide range of feelings, from anger to sarcasm to wry optimism.
Her intimate lyrics often conjure bad feelings—betrayal, powerlessness, the gross human need to impress others. On the album’s first verse, Samia sings, “I said loving you is bigger than my head/And then you dove in/And then I said, ‘I’m afraid that I need men’/ You said, ‘Need me, then.’” It sounds overwhelming, giving yourself to someone like that, being taunted into it, and the conversational tone makes the verses feel both personal and perverse. She offers crystal clear images, like on “Does Not Heal,” where she recounts cutting her thigh after climbing a fence, remembering being “so scared I had tetanus/I checked on it every night/Purple and yellow/The pregnable skin was so coarse and tight.” The images she produces range from realistic to metaphysical, but they’re always evocative and sensory.
Samia often forgoes the practice of burying uncomfortable personal emotions with obscure lyrics, opting for diaristic clarity and precision. It’s unclear who the “baby” of her album title is, but still, the intimacy of the term speaks to the weird in-between space that Samia’s generation is occupying right now. As many people like to say of the Class of 2020, we were college freshmen when Trump was elected and graduated in a pandemic. With few job prospects and usually no health insurance, a lot of us have turned to living with our parents. It’s hard to become an adult at a time where everything is so dangerous, to stop seeing yourself as a baby when you’re still so vulnerable. But life still happens and it still hurts in all the typical ways—heartbreak, bad friends, confusion. Songwriters like Samia are still trying to make sense of it.
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