Genre is a vessel for SASAMI, the indie-coded mononymic project of Sasami Ashworth, who fully embraced her heavy metal and pop punk influences on 2022’s industrial-leaning Squeeze. Its follow-up, on the other hand, is framed as a pop pivot, not unlike another 2022 effort by her former tourmate Mitski. But Ashworth, whose self-titled debut was a diaristic collection of lush shoegaze, never presented herself as a secret metalhead, and she didn’t exactly grow up revering pop, either; in fact, she often found herself thrown off by some of its cheesier tendencies. A conservatory-trained French horn player, Ashworth developed a playful curiosity about the format, and what’s interesting isn’t how she does pop but what she does to it – showcasing her versatility without straying from her core vision. “Fundamentally, I wrote all the songs on an acoustic guitar so that they, at their essence, are just a song,” Ashworth said in a recent interview. Made with producers Jenn Decilveo and Rostam, Blood on the Silver Screen finds compelling ways to twist and expand them, but the moments that shine through the brightest are just that: great songs, unbound by style.
1. Slugger
SASAMI comes out swinging with ‘Slugger’, a song that needs just over thirty seconds to fuel up the most addictivbe chorus she’s ever written. Sticky pop hooks written by people in the indie world sometimes fail to carry their own weight, but Ashworth and her collaborators embellish the song’s production so that it feels huge and gauzy at the same time. Vocally, she doesn’t feign confidence so much as harness her vulnerability, reaching her upper register for the line “Asking myself why I’m putting my heart on the line.” But she also understands that any catchy pop song needs a dose of absurdism, preceding it with, “Now I’m cry cry crying like Dolly from 9-5.” (Parton gets namechecked in the same song as Steve Lacy, which is cool.) It’s a risky experiment and a fine line to tread, but ‘Slugger’ basically opens Blood on the Silver Screen by basically serving as its proof of concept.
2. Just Be Friends
The immediate mention of self-hatred is pretty jarring, but this sweet, breezily wistful song about being hopelessly in love holds itself strong – even if it runs a little long and lacks a good twist. Another quickly hummable chorus makes up for it, though.
3. I’ll Be Gone
There’s a song later on the album called ‘For the Weekend’, but ‘I’ll Be Gone’ actually sounds like the Weeknd – cinematic and full of bombast in a way that’s impressive and far from cheap. But Ashworth’s voice – frustrated and lovesick, yearning yet defiant – is unmistakable, simmering up from the romantic uncertainty of the previous track. The temptation is no longer just being held but turned on, rendering the alluring electropop a good fit.
4. Love Makes You Do Crazy Things
It’s nice to see the glam-metal tendencies of Squeeze bleed over into ‘Love Makes You Do Crazy Things’, which you wouldn’t expect at this point on the album. Everything else about the song’s structure is virtually a pop tune, though there are also some interesting and (fittingly) disorienting choices in terms of percussion. Quite a big swing indeed.
5. In Love With a Memory [feat. Clairo]
Even if it weren’t a duet, ‘In Love With a Memory’ is quite melodically interesting, but it’s Ashworth and Claire Cotrill’s harmonizing that really keeps it engaging. They represent one character longing for the past, the other yearning to move forward, according to press materials – a dynamic they evoke while singing the same words. It’s the first song on the record made in collaboration with Rostam, who produced Clairo’s debut Immunity, and the (also classically trained) producer also pushed Ashworth to write the guitar solo, which is technically impressive without overshadowing the song’s emotional core.
6. Possessed
This being framed as a pop record really undersells the variety of tricks Ashworth tries out, at least in terms of production. The synths on ‘Possessed’ really do sound like they could open up to swallow her whole. “Touching my lips, my lips with a stranger/ Pushing my hips to the edge of danger/ Someone’s possessing me tonight,” she sings; the song never fully explodes, but the tension’s there.
7. Figure It Out
Now, this one does explode. Ashworth is quite playful with her lyrics on Blood on the Silver Screen, but she relies a bit too much on platitudes here: “If you change your mind, I promise I’ll be fine/ And we’ll make it out, yeah we’ll make it out.” Also, it’s hard to believe Clairo isn’t on this song – it boasts exactly the kind of melody she’d write!
8. For the Weekend
With its bratty pop-punk feel, ‘For the Weekend’ definitely harks back to Ashworth’s days as a member of Cherry Glazer. Thematically, it’s also a chance for her to treat the fragility of an undefined relationship with more humour than previous tracks: “You want a relationship/ But I just wanna relate then dip/ This isn’t a fishing trip/ I’m not trying to catch feelings,” she sings in a way that you can’t help but chuckle.
9. Honeycrash
Lending Blood on the Silver Screen its name, ‘Honeycrash’ is also the album’s biggest standout, at once its most lyrically evocative and musically potent track. The guitars crash even harder than they do on ‘Figure It Out’; the drums more booming than they sound on ‘Love Makes You Do Crazy Things’. It’s a plea so overpowering and poetic it hardly sounds desperate.
10. Smoke (Banished From Eden)
Ashworth lets the intensity of ‘Honeycrash’ settle with this one, a short instrumental interlude blanketed by Ashworth’s first instrument, the French horn.
11. Nothing But a Sad Face On
‘Smoke’ also works as an introduction to ‘Nothing But a Sad Face On’, which feels a little superfluous despite its cinematic arrangement. As hopeful mantras go, “a mouth of honey is worth the sting” is just too clunky to really stand behind.
12. Lose It All
The album gets back on its feet with the delightful ‘Lose It All’, which sounds like it could’ve been written for the last HAIM album. Makes sense, since this is the other song that Rostam – no, wait, that’s the next one, which…
13. The Seed
Goes full grunge? And it really works, ensuring the bookends of the record are different yet equally impressive. In its first verse, ‘The Seed’ offers an apt summation of Blood on the Silver Screen’s themes and metaphorical language: “Love, it’s a fire that burns within/ Pain, it’s the fuel that makes it spin/ Change, it’s the wind that fans the flames and/ Growth, it’s the ash that bears its name.” Over dynamic production, Ashworth then plays with the words as if to carve a way out of doubt, darkness, and cliché. Ashworth doesn’t suggest which of the forces in question holds the advantage. Only two lines blaze with conviction, a true promise: “I’ll be your cover through the cold and rain/ Keeping you safe and warm.” A reminder that love can make you do the simplest things, too.
