Today, American musician Sasami (the moniker for Sasami Ashworth) released her third album, Blood On The Silver Screen via Domino Recording Co.
Blood On The Silver Screen is a powerful statement of artistry and evolution. Blending alt-rock and electro-pop with a theatrical flair, the album feels bold, experimental, and unapologetically empowering.
Lyrically, Blood On The Silver Screen explores themes of identity, desire, and transformation. Sasami’s words cut through with a mix of vulnerability and defiance, often using cinematic imagery to heighten the drama. The album title itself reflects this — a metaphor for passion and pain played out on an exaggerated, almost mythic stage.
About the album by Sasami:
“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.
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.”
Blood On The Silver Screen gets: 📷📷📷📷📷📷📷📷/10.
Sasami – Blood On The Silver Screen [Streaming]
