While Sasami has always slipped easily between genres, her latest career move surprised even her most ardent fans — but her pivot to pop is just the next stop on a trajectory that’s been in motion since she released her debut album in 2019.
“Every album kind of comes from something in the previous album cycle. So when I was touring my first album, the songs were pretty quiet and mellow,” Sasami, 34, exclusively told Us Weekly. “At that time, there were a lot of old, crotchety dudes doing sound, and they would always be like, ‘Your voice is too quiet and your guitars are too loud.’ And that really pushed me to actually turn my guitar even louder out of some form of rebellion.”
That pushback led to the “aggressively large guitar sounds” of 2022’s Squeeze, which in turn led to where we are now: her third album, Blood on the Silver Screen.
“From touring Squeeze, I was touring with a metal band, and there’s a way you’re supposed to scream if you’re a professional metal screamer — and I really wasn’t doing that, I was just screaming like I was being murdered every night,” she explained. “That was affecting my voice and it was making me a little bit nervous that I wouldn’t be protecting my instrument. And so that era really pushed me into an album of writing songs that were really meant to be sung and really focusing on songwriting as the craft for this album cycle.”
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Sasami’s voice is front and center on Blood on the Silver Screen, which is full of bops that, in a perfect world, would play on the radio between Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish. But the singer, who studied classical French horn at the famed Eastman School of Music, didn’t just turn on a synth and call it a day. Instead, she approached her pop era with academic precision, in part because she actually didn’t grow up listening to much mainstream music.
“When I was growing up, people really self-identified with the genre that they listen to,” she explained. “Now I feel like you can see a kid that’s dressed super goth, and you’d be like, ‘Oh, are you, like, an outcast weirdo?’ And they’re like, ‘No, actually I got this from Urban Outfitters.’ You can’t really tell as much anymore. Whereas when I was growing up, it was like, if you were counterculture, you were counterculture, and you didn’t listen to pop music.”
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As “a young, weird band kid,” Sasami “never really actively listened” to pop, but it still wormed its way into her brain. When she grew up and started her career as a professional musician, however, she initially felt pressure to write songs that you’d never hear on Top 40 radio.
“Pop music was something that always felt like a novelty. Like, at the end of a tour when you’re just trying to rally the troops to get home, you put on Rihanna and Britney Spears to keep the vibe up in the van,” she recalled. “But then I was tapping into like, why does pop music give you this feeling of uplifting? And instead of shying away from that as being some sort of guilty pleasure, I’m like, ‘What if I just acknowledge it as a pleasure, period?’”
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For Blood on the Silver Screen, she “was trying to tap into the things that I like about pop music and what makes it so addictive and catchy instead of being like, ‘Oh, it’s this really saccharine, shiny thing that isn’t sincere. [I was] trying to understand what is actually at the core of the extreme, sincere humanness that attracts all people to pop music.”
That’s not to say that her new music is lacking substance. On album opener “Slugger,” for example, she sings about the pain that comes with realizing wisdom doesn’t always come with age while referencing Dolly Parton, Steve Lacy and Frédéric Chopin.
“It’s like putting on a Halloween costume. You’re trying to dress like this one thing, but you’re still always gonna kind of look like yourself, and it’s like that when you’re trying on different genres,” she told Us. “Even when I’m making major-key, upbeat, four-on-the-floor pop music, the part of it that’s me is when I’m talking about relationships and drama. Because of my nature, there’s always gonna be a bit of a melancholic or melodramatic element to the storytelling just because of my own personal experience.”
And in a final stroke of staying true to herself, Sasami is bringing her French horn on tour for the first time. “You can definitely expect a mystical, almost operatic, dramatic theatrical stage performance on this next cycle,” she said. “[I’m] going all out and going deep into the drama and the histrionics of it.”
Blood on the Silver Screen is out now.
