Samina – Further.

‘Friend’ is the follow-up to NY-based singer-songwriter Samina Saifee’s debut single, ‘Prom’, released earlier this year. With a talent for producing songs that seem to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders and which reflect back the often tragic poignancy of memories, ‘Prom’ was an ear-catching debut for both its heartfelt lyrical quotient but also its simple, understated delivery.

Her new single is, according to Saifee, “a letter to the one who got away, the person who was never yours but who somehow still managed to break your heart.” Across a delicate, fragile backdrop of swooning, dreamy pads, subtle beats and an omnipresent layered, bell-like melody, ‘Friend’ is a diaristic outpouring of intense emotion, almost like Saifee is narrating a moving scene from the movie of her own life. There is catharsis here but it is a bitter, difficult transcendence that you hear on ‘Friend’. Its final moments, as Saifee accepts that the elusive object of her affections is just that – a fleeting, impermanent person yet whose imprint on her heart is indelible – is nothing short of tragic to hear.

Two singles in and Samina Saifee is displaying a knack for delivering complex emotional epithets that document the pivotal moments in her life; the events that have shaped who she is and the way she views the world. The equivalent of the novelist’s roman-à-clef, Saifee’s music is personal yet relatable, and carries a subtle, stirring depth.

‘Friend’ by Samina is released December 4 2020.

Words: Mat Smith

prom 2

“I taught myself how to play guitar when I was 15, started writing songs at 18, and now I’m 20 and there are few things I love more than music,” says Samina Saifee, a Detroit-born, New York-based singer-songwriter.

Samina has just released her debut single, the delicate and moving ‘Prom’. “It’s is a love letter to the summer after high school,” she explains. “It’s funny to me that everyone knows prom as a night that never quite lives up to our dreams. Finishing this song was my way of closing a chapter in my life even though it’s been years since that night, and even though it didn’t live up to my dreams.”

‘Prom’ is built up from gentle, ebbing layers of guitar, piano and discrete electronics, presented with a gauzy ethereality as if looking back on an especially poignant memory. There is a plaintive, wistful, dejected quality to Samina’s beatific lyrics, full of expectation and ultimately disappointment at going home alone. “Can’t tell you how small the world feels when you’re seventeen,” is the song’s final line, left hanging in the empty school halls of Samina’s hopes and dreams as she looks back on the naivete of youth.

prom 1

Prom by Samina was released July 25 2020. Listen at Spotify.

Words: Mat Smith

Further.

Tag: Samina

Samina – Friend

Samina – Prom