Samantha Urbani may be best known as founding and fronting her own band Friends, the Brooklyn-based indie darlings, who were known for bridging their DIY roots into the mainstream, and also for collaborating with renowned music project Blood Orange, but she is about to cut her own unique swathe through the music landscape all over again.
2017’s debut solo EP Policies of Power and 2019’s single “Made in Love“, have provided tantalising tasters of what to expect from her solo material, but with new full single “More Than a Feeling”, which is the first single from Samantha’s forthcoming debut album, Urbani will now cement her position as unparalleled pop contrarian bar none.
“In music it’s natural to share love and connections with other people in music, and whether to collaborate or not is a complicated question. I wrote the vocal to something an ex was playing, just in my head. It became this weird solo conversation, a one sided collaboration. It sat on the back burner, but the emotion remained timeless enough to come back to. Years later I was falling in love, which was a cool and safe place to be, finishing a song about the opposite. I brought Molly Lewis into the studio to whistle, which sounds like an old western soundtrack for the tough guy who’s got no choice, and is really the tenderest of all” explains Samantha.
The track was written, recorded and co-produced with Nick Weiss (aka Nightfeelings) and features all-star ethereal whistling from Molly Lewis. Sonically Samantha’s music captures a wide range of vintage influences, from Janet Jackson to Tom Tom Club, halcyon 80s Madonna, 90s R&B to glossy disco and grooved out guitar-pop, her poetic lyricism and signature throwback production puts her in the league of pop’s greatest.
The accompanying music video, which Samantha directed, explores the liminality of unrequited love. She wanders through the neon wasteland of LA’s Hollywood Boulevard before embarking on a motorcycle ride with a helmeted man, never truly connecting with her masked driver or finding a place to settle down. Samantha says:
“My references for this video are pretty succinct. Toni Braxton’s “Unbreak my Heart” and Celine Dion “It’s all coming back to me now” – both 90s vids that had a huge impact on me, with boyfriends who die in motorcycle crashes. The video is a rescue fantasy – motorcycle guy is a modern day knight in shining armour- heroic but inhuman, totally protected with walls that cannot be broken thru. So, it’s the antagonist who I can’t seem to reach even when they’re right in front of me. A tragic figure of toxic masculine fragility/emotional unavailability. All of the motorcycle guy sequences are meant to be questioned whether it’s real or imagined. Like I’m waiting to be rescued and fantasizing knowing I’m on my own“.
