‘Blood on the Silverscreen’ represents the process of SASAMI embracing herself

Mar 7

SASAMI announces Blood On the Silver Screen, her audacious and epic new album due March 7, 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.”

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.”