Samara Cyn is airborne. She’s about to board a jet, too. When her voice beams through the phone for our second interview in two months, the military baby turned rap&b hybridizer grins in transit. TSA and Delta attendants freckle the background.
After a New York performance, it’s Berlin’s turn to absorb the oil-slick, infectious, punch-lined lowrider “music 4 ya aunty” that Samara’s made her bread and butter. More life for a pseudo-free city. “Wake Up,” a backpacker-pleaser released last year, wraps criticisms of microplastics in charming Southern crunch. Its self-directed video manages to pull off both an amusing comedy sketch starring a stray cigarette, and vibrant staged shots. T’s crossed, i’s dotted.
“Subconsciously, being exposed to so many different cultures shaped me,” Samara tells us. “We lived in Augusta, Georgia, where I got my phone number. That was a couple of years. Also El Paso, Texas, by the border. Hawaii. Colorado. Listening to old school hip-hop with my dad, then country and rock with my mom. Both of them are from Tennessee, where my sister and I were born. Mom showed me alternative, which led to a deep obsession with Florence & The Machine. That taught me about melody stacks. I want to experiment at the forefront, not just be niche.”
They say it never happens overnight, and they’re right. It took about 56 for Samara to flip a batch of green-soaked, one-minute remixes into a 2024 rookie of the year campaign endorsed by Erykah Badu. Another 365 between those clips and the homemade freestyle she recorded on a DoorDash delivery break in LA. Her Arizona college days, spent flexing vocal chops at local radio stations and cooking from a distance with North Carolina producer Michael Knight, account for some 1200 more earthturns.
All this preceded by a lifetime of absorbed reference points: her first concert (Ed Sheeran), her personal bibles (Rihanna’s Anti; Tyler, the Creator’s everything). If you let the commenters tell it, she’s an immaculate rap Frankenstein (compliment) designed in a lab last week (derogatory). Samara’s unbothered.
“I’m in this transition, going from feeling like a fan to feeling like I can hold my own,” she says. “I’m making heavier business decisions for myself, frequenting places with people I look up to all of a sudden, and I’ve had to shift my mindset from being little bro to being a student, but having confidence in myself too. Six months ago I was at Isaiah Rashad’s show in the audience and now I’m performing with him. I earned it. I’ll see some people commenting, like, ‘I’m glad she’s rapping with her clothes on,’ and I’m like, ‘Don’t get too used to it.’ [Laughs] We can wear whatever we want.”
Growing up on base, Samara chose the cul-de-sac over cartoons, inventing games outside with other childhood schemers. That proclivity for wonderment and a little mischief fuels her upcoming album, The Drive Home, along with her familial crew’s quality control: sync’d calendars, weekly debriefs, rewrites under magnolia rain lighting, and extra attention paid to sequencing. Every facet, from the recorded stories to Cyn’s hoopty keychain to her airbrushed emerald nail art (shoutout Brittany Nini), connect another dot emanating from her imagination. She knows what she wants. It's representative of the systems we endure that the same platform that catalyzes a deserving talent in Samara also stifles pro-Palestine voices all at once. This is 2024.
“Somebody’s got it when you get that feeling just by mentioning their name,” she says with a laugh, in reference to Dijon. “People making music without bounds. There’s no rules when they sit down to create; no limitations in the room. When I think of Rihanna, I think, Rihanna. Not what genre. ‘Pon De Replay,’ ‘Run This Town,’ ‘Love on the Brain.’ If you go to a concert and the flow of show is all over the place, you feel that. Versatile and cohesive. That’s my goal, along with capturing life’s ebbs and flows of feeling confident, then questioning it all. [Laughs] We’ll see what happens with this first project.”
It's a running joke among ailing vocalists that the microphone magic of a scratchy throat is worth the danger to their larynx. Samara’s natural tones carry some of that swaggering scratch, like a singsong Chladni plate, on “Pride’s Interlude.” Her latest single, “Moving Day,” pairs slingshot raps with quicksilver harmonies that blitz your ears then vanish. It’s easy to understand why Bootleg Kev made Samara a key to his studio soon after she moved to California. As she fends off demo-itis and industry sirens behind the scenes (“If I meet someone and their energy doesn’t match the contract, it’s a dealbreaker”), all signs point to a long future of Samara featuring Samara.
“Magnolia Rain” drops June 12. The Drive Home album is expected this autumn.
This story originally appeared in Pigeons & Planes / COMPLEX.