SASAMI announces new album 'Blood On the Silver Screen' + shares huge new single "Slugger"

SASAMI

Announces new album Blood On the Silver Screen out March 7th
Watch video for huge lead single “Slugger”
Playing UK next month

Early praise for Blood On the Silver Screen:
"SASAMI puts it all on the line for love on her massive new song" Rolling Stone
"Where once she wrote music for sticky-floored rock shows, 'Honeycrash' feels purpose-built for much bigger venues. It's a bold and intriguing reinvention, the kind that makes you sit upright and pay attention." The FADER
"Emotionally and sonically daring pop music... 'Honeycrash' cements itself as one of the most fearless feats in her discography thus far." Paste
“The genre-bending musician fuses ballads, heavy metal and industrial sounds to create music dripping with emotion” Dazed On The Rise
"SASAMI commands attention. With new single ‘Honeycrash,’ though, there’s something particularly noteworthy about the contrast, where her delicate vocals sit in direct opposition to the heavy guitar chords and striking production." Consequence
“Epic, stadium-sized songwriting” Clash
 
SASAMI announces Blood On the Silver Screen, her audacious and epic new album due March 7th 2025 via Domino. On it, the polymath combines her classical conservatory-trained skills as a player, producer, and composer with her fearless and bombastic stage persona to create her most realized music to date: the all-out SASAMI pop record. “This album is all about learning and respecting the craft of pop songwriting, about relenting to illogical passion, obsession, and guiltless pleasure,” SASAMI says. “It’s about leaning into the chaos of romance and sweeping devotion—romanticism to the point of self-destruction.”
 
Nothing exemplifies this more than the wistfully optimistic album opener and lead single “Slugger,” released today alongside an explosive video directed by Crystalline Structures Studio. On the lively track, SASAMI name checks Dolly Parton, Chopin, and Steve Lacy. Though her background is in classical music and production, she doubled down on Blood On the Silver Screen’s lyrics: “I wanted to be more playful and communicate more with pop culture,” she says. “When I listen to music, I think about how I feel, how I want to feel, how I want to move to it. And that’s what’s special about music—how it connects to culture, how it connects to different styles of music, how it connects to the timbre of the voice of the person singing it.”
 
After establishing herself with the poised melancholia of her eponymous 2019 debut, SASAMI embraced volume and control on 2022’s Squeeze—touring with a metal band—but her goal on Blood On the Silver Screen was to speak her truth with conviction by singing. Working with co-producers Jenn Decilveo and Rostam, with SASAMI as sole writer, each Blood On the Silver Screen track viscerally captures a different thread of love, sex, power, and embodiment. “Pop music is like fuel,” Sasami says. “It’s just invigorating.”
 
Eschewing today’s pop zeitgeist, Sasami gravitated towards late aughts and 2010s pop a la Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, plus Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, and Sia. She was influenced by modern country storytelling, mixing vulnerability with humor, and the mood board also included Prince, Japanese city pop, and the stadium-sized, denim-clad iconography of Bruce Springsteen.
 
Watch the “Slugger” video here.

Now in her early 30s, Sasami didn’t grow up listening to much pop music, and even felt pressures to avoid it. “I was always a weirdo outsider and I didn’t feel like pop music spoke to me,” she said. “Being a woman of color, I’ve always felt this pressure or need to make something that’s mysterious or innovative, and always shied away from lightheartedness.” But she also sees Blood On the Silver Screen’s embrace of pleasure as a kind of personal reclamation. Raised in Los Angeles in the “conservative religious cult” of the Unification Church, her senses of herself and her sexuality were skewed. “My relationship to love and sex was so tied into these repressive, super restrictive definitions,” she says. The album is an extension of her process of coming into herself as part of a generation unbeholden to conventions around love, sex, or the nuclear family. “This album for me is about having deep, meaningful relationships within a new definition of what is good, what is right, and what is powerful,” she says. “We are still passionate beings.”
 
“I wanted to go all out with this album,” Sasami continues. “I wanted to, in my tenderness and emotionality, have the bravery to undertake something as epic as making a pop record about love. I hope it makes people feel empowered and embodied, too. It’s important to not box yourself in.” 

An intense period of touring Squeeze included dates with Haim, Mitski, and Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Before traveling as Haim’s opener, Sasami was actually rehearsing to play in the sisters’ touring band; having known Haim since high school, Sasami calls their “elevated pop music” a definite inspiration to Blood On the Silver Screen. The pandemic disrupted the plan to join their ensemble, but through those rehearsals, Sasami met Rostam (at the time, Haim’s music director), who she worked with on two songs for Blood On the Silver Screen: the grungy closing ballad “The Seed” and the stirringly arpeggiated “In Love With a Memory,” featuring Clairo.
 
Another crucial collaborator was director Andrew Thomas Huang (Björk, FKA Twigs), with whom Sasami began conceptualizing the new record’s visual world before the music was even recorded. “I like there to be a union between the visual and musical world,” she says, care that shines through the corporeal video for the previously released “Honeycrash.” The song is a panorama of longing: Sasami’s widest-screen rendering of the processes of love in all its devastation and expansiveness. A stadium-sized ballad that swells with cinematic grandeur, this is Sasami as an auteur of heartache, mixing the epic sweep of a romantic era opera with sci-fi action to say, “This is how I feel, I’m going to let you figure it out. But don’t give up on us.” It’s another moment where she drew on her classical roots: “I still long for those expansions and contractions, swells and whimpers. For me, the oscillating feeling is, ‘Okay, I'm somatically grounding and self-soothing—and then all of a sudden I’m completely devastated.’”

 Track List:
1. Slugger
2. Just Be Friends
3. I’ll Be Gone
4. Love Makes You Do Crazy Things
5. In Love With A Memory (Feat. Clairo)
6. Possessed
7. Figure it Out
8. For The Weekend
9. Honeycrash
10. Smoke (Banished from Eden)
11. Nothing But A Sad Face On
12. Lose It All
13. The Seed
 
Blood On the Silver Screen is available to pre-order at the Domino Mart on Blood Red and Standard Black vinyl, CD and digitally. Dom Mart | Digital 
 
Tour Dates:
22nd October - Belin, DE @ Urban Spree
23rd October - Paris, FR @ Le Pop-Up Du Label
26th October - Amsterdam, NE @ London Calling
29th October - London, UK @ The Lower Third
30th October - Manchester, UK @ Yes
6th November - Chicago, IL @ Concord Music Hall
7th November - Columbus, OH @ The King of Clubs
8th November - Pittsburgh, PA @ Thunderbird Cafe & Music Hall
9th November - Detroit, MI @ The Eastern
10th November - Toronto, ON @ The Opera House
12th November - Montreal, QC @ Theatre Fairmount
14th November - Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club
15th November - Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer
16th November - New York, NY @ Webster Hall
17th November - Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club
18th November - Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle
20th November - Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade
22nd November - Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live Midtown
23rd November - San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger
24th November - McAllen, TX @ Cine El Rey

SASAMI Online:
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