The singer-songwriter aims for a bigger sound with her new EP, a condensed whirlwind of breakups, reunions, long-distance phone calls, and long-haul road trips.
There’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment late in To Kill a Mockingbird in which Scout, after meeting Boo Radley for the first and last time, walks home alone. “As I made my way home, I felt very old,” she narrates, “but when I looked at the top of my nose, I could see fine misty beads, but looking cross-eyed made me dizzy, so I quit.” It’s an uncharacteristically whimsical passage for its logical setup: the experience of seeing misty beads is not exclusive to youth, but Scout’s flitting attention—as well as the defiantly indirect admission that she is, in fact, crying—imply her persistent girlhood.
On her excellent 2020 debut, The Baby, Samia sought refuge in the same willful distraction. The cozy “Big Wheel” begins with a child’s litany (“I got bug bites on my legs/I got two friends who look alike/I got coffee in the morning/And my mama in the night”), slowly approaching the subject of a deceitful boyfriend; the narrator of “Waverly” painstakingly describes an East Village diner before alluding to her own heartbreak. Even if The Baby is ultimately about being a daughter, lover, and friend, its scatteredness lent an oblique lens to Samia’s adolescent blues, her shrugging honesty eschewing that oh-so-millennial earnestness.
The follow-up EP Scout is a condensed whirlwind of breakups, reunions, long-distance phone calls, and long-haul road trips. As a songwriter, Samia remains wary of melodrama; she still talks about her friends and parents in the interchangeable manner of an only child. If the result is a more ponderous record than its predecessor, that’s mainly due to Boone Wallace and Andy Seltzer’s production. Like a lost track from Now Now’s Saved, Scout’s centerpiece “Show Up” opens with melancholy piano chords and blooms into a warehouse-sized arrangement with an enrapturing chorus and a legit beat drop. Although The Baby flirted with electronic elements, it mostly stuck to an intimate indie-rock sound; in comparison, Scout sounds big.
At times, the synths and vocal effects leave Samia sounding a bit washed out. She’s got a pretty remarkable voice, yet her inflection is delicate, her default mode a narcotized listlessness punctuated with plaintive refrains. But for the most part, the engineering is deployed with purpose: where The Baby didn’t have much room for singalong anthems, Scout has several, including a faithful rendition of When in Rome’s “The Promise.” The cover makes for a curiously apropos finale—if you didn’t know better, you’d assume that the rushing chorus and beatific lyrics were Samia’s own.
Even the title of her debut, The Baby, functioned as both an apology and alibi, an admission of frivolity, and a promise to clean up her act. Scout suggests a more interesting trajectory and a more difficult one—there’s never any shortage of angst or longing when the irony runs out. With luck, Samia could be one of those perpetually coming-of-age figures like Stevie Nicks, Liz Phair, and Carly Rae Jepsen, dwelling in the rapturous precipices, chasing sunsets and self-discovery no matter the cost.
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