Every song from New York City’s Samia shows a poet’s gift for capturing the most private of experiences, a gritty specificity that leaves her lyrics carved right onto your heart. Her ballads recall a low-lit charm and her rock songs rev and howl with intensity. But whether the volume is up or down, Samia draws from the same well of sharp-witted lyricism as forebears old and new —from Patti Smith to Liz Phair to Josh Tillman.

Now with her new double A-side single “Lasting Friend”/“Paris,” Samia further proves her profound skill at transforming painful or ugly or entirely ordinary moments into something transcendent. The gloriously scrappy yet strangely tender “Lasting Friend” finds Samia building an unlikely anthem out of a complicated high school memory. “I have this party anecdote about how the boys in middle school used to line up in the gym and touch my boobs,” she recalls. “It's as funny as it is difficult for me to grapple with, because it's how I learned to measure my worth. I made a lot of friends thatway and it's hard to unlearn that routine; we were all trying to make sense of the roles we were assigned.”

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