As we close out 2025, certain songs linger not because they dominated the charts but because they captured something true about the year’s emotional undercurrent.
Samia’s “Bovine Excision”, released back in January as the lead single from Bloodless, deserves another look.
Whilst other artists chased immediacy, Samia built something that’s only grown more relevant as the months passed.
“Diet Dr Pepper, Raymond Carver / Sitting in the bathtub while they’re knocking.”
That opening couplet drops you into Samia’s world where high literature brushes against everyday objects.
The track borrows its title from a genuinely unsettling phenomenon: cattle discovered dead across American farmland since the 1970s, bodies drained entirely of blood, precise incisions suggesting something surgical rather than predatory.
These deaths remain unexplained, wrapped in theories ranging from the mundane to the extraterrestrial.
Using this macabre folklore as a framework for examining female experience shouldn’t work, yet Samia makes it devastatingly coherent.
She’s drawn to the mystery of what’s missing rather than what’s present. The album title itself, “Bloodless”, points to this preoccupation with emptiness, with the power that exists in absence rather than presence.
Sound: Deceptive Warmth Hiding Something Colder
The production team of Caleb Wright and Lupin creates a sonic environment that initially feels safe.
Brushed percussion and a fluid bassline establish a foundation that recalls the intimacy of bedroom indie-rock, yet there’s something unsettling lurking beneath the surface. The guitar work shimmers but never quite resolves, hanging in the air with deliberate ambiguity.
What makes the track remarkable is how it uses warmth as camouflage. Samia’s vocal delivery stays breathless and close, as though she’s confiding secrets in a darkened room. She doesn’t belt or push; instead, she draws you nearer until you’re complicit in the unraveling.
The sparse arrangement gives every element room to haunt: each guitar note, each drum tap, each pause carries weight.
Christian Lee Hutson’s co-writing influence shows in the literary approach to melody, whilst Lupin’s bass work anchors the track without overpowering it.
Soren Burkum’s drumming remains restrained throughout, tapping rather than driving, suggesting rather than insisting.
The outro shifts the entire dynamic. “Drained, drained bloodless” cycles through four repetitions, each one emptier than the last.
The phrase becomes incantatory, transforming from words into pure emotional residue. It’s the sound of someone watching themselves disappear, clinically documenting their own erasure.
You might also like:
- Boygenius’ Cool About It: A Deep Dive into the Lyrics, Meaning, and Video
- Exploring The Heartfelt Layers: The Meaning Behind Lizzy McAlpine’s Ceilings Lyrics
- We Hug Now Song Meaning & Review: Sydney Rose’s Emotional Reflection
- Big Thief’s Velvet Ring Lyrics Meaning and Interpretation: A Deep Dive into Fragility, Survival, and Unconventional Love
- Wednesday’s Elderberry Wine Review: Lyrics, Meaning & Video
- Billie Eilish’s Wildflower Lyrics Explained: Guilt, Grief, and Loving the Wrong Person
Lyrics: A Taxonomy of Unattainable Desires
Samia structures the song as an escalating series of impossible wants. The first verse establishes the central paradox: “I wanna be untouchable,” she sings, her voice feather-light despite the severity of the wish.
This isn’t about confidence or power. It’s about vanishing entirely, becoming so distant that harm can’t reach you.
Each subsequent verse raises the stakes. “I wanna be impossible,” she declares in verse three, and the shift matters.
Untouchable suggests distance; impossible suggests non-existence. She’s not just seeking protection anymore. She’s pursuing complete abstraction from the constraints of being human.
The imagery moves between surrealist snapshots and uncomfortable physicality. “You took the door off its hinges” speaks to violation of privacy, whilst “Doll eyes red in the litmus” evokes both childhood toys and scientific testing, the self as object under examination.
The question “I felt the pea, can I eat it?” references the fairy tale princess so sensitive she feels a pea through twenty mattresses, turning hypersensitivity into a grotesque party trick.
Verse three delivers body horror in plain language: “Picking leeches off white underwear / Neck, back, inscrutable stare.”
The leeches transform the body into something invaded, whilst the “inscrutable stare” suggests disconnection even from one’s own experience.
Then Samia pivots to narrative. Fred appears, flirting with a bartender, claiming they met last year. Her reply cuts through his nostalgia: “I’m old but I’m not dead.”
The exchange feels like eavesdropping, a moment of overheard defiance that briefly interrupts the song’s inward spiral.
The fifth verse luxuriates in specific detail: “Rice wine, lime-flavoured Lays / Passing go to sit in driveways / Clad in leopard, clutch the banister / Twirling like a Degas dancer.”
Here Samia finds poetry in the particular, invoking the French painter whose ballet works depicted women as beautiful objects, frozen mid-motion, their grace inseparable from their constraint.
The Devastating Simplicity of the Outro
After verses stacked with metaphor and abstraction, Samia strips everything bare: “I just wanted to be your friend.”
The plainness hits harder than any surreal image that preceded it. She’s abandoned the cattle mutilations, the impossibility, the whole elaborate scaffolding. What remains is a want so ordinary it feels revolutionary.
“Cup of tea in your cold hand” follows, offering warmth to someone who can’t receive it.
The image contains all the tenderness the rest of the song avoided, and that makes it unbearable. This is what she wanted all along: simple human connection, the kind you can hold in your hands.
Then the bloodlessness returns as a final reckoning. “And drained, drained bloodless” repeats four times, each iteration more hollow than the previous.
She wanted to give everything and instead found herself depleted. The phrase becomes her reality, the clinical emptiness she feared and somehow manifested.
The song doesn’t resolve. It just ends, leaving you in the void it spent four minutes constructing.
Why This Song Matters at Year’s End
Looking back across 2025, ‘Bovine Excision’ reads differently than it did in January. The song’s meditation on performing impossible standards whilst yearning for basic connection has aged into something uncomfortably prescient.
Samia wasn’t just processing personal experience; she was mapping emotional territory that many of us wandered through this year.
Released via Rough Trade as the lead single from Bloodless, the track introduced Samia’s third album with quiet confidence.
The full record, co-written with Christian Lee Hutson and shaped by Wright and Lupin’s production, expanded on these themes of absence and mystery.
But ‘Bovine Excision’ remains its most distilled statement, its purest expression of wanting to disappear whilst desperately needing to be seen.
The song succeeds it is left open-ended. The cattle mutilations stay unsolved. The bloodlessness remains unexplained. Samia’s pursuit of impossibility never resolves into acceptance or growth.
She simply documents the gap between what we’re told to be and what we actually need, between the performance of untouchability and the reality of human want.
Twelve months later, that gap feels wider than ever. ‘Bovine Excision’ doesn’t offer comfort or catharsis.
It offers something rarer: honest witness to the exhaustion of impossible standards, the slow drain of trying to become an idea when all you wanted was a cup of tea and someone to share it with.