Bio

Sama Dams may have started as an internal exploration for frontman Sam Adams to challenge his traditional music education with avant-garde compositions and unexpected instrumentations, but the now three-piece has built the band into a beast of its own. Since 2014’s “Comfort in Doubt” release, the band has been writing more collaboratively, and Sam has been joined by frontwoman Lisa Adams. While Sam's storytelling is more subdued, depicting the kind of bruised idealism that fractures from one moment to the next, Lisa's songwriting inhabits a more confident Annie Clark-like approach to darkness, often gleefully taking the predator's role in her narratives. In this evolution since the band’s first EP in 2011, the dynamic has become more experimental and complex with each release. You’ll hear Wurlitzer electric organ playing an active role in their sound, but the multi-instrumentalists will often highlight this with a passionate guitar riff, distorted bass, dirty synth or bright ukulele. Alongside, drummer and percussionist Chris Hermsen employs electric drum techniques playing acoustic drums, pulling inspiration from James Blake or Ian Chang. Overall, the trio’s brilliance is the vital interdependency between the vocals and the music; in each song, they create an energy which builds slowly from a hum to a howl, that lingers even in the silence. “Mounted on the Wall” and “We Never Met” take a more solemn and controlled approach than the predecessors from the band’s last album “Comfort in Doubt” which dipped its toe into R&B-Pop. In nature, “Mounted on the Wall” would be the bending and cracking of a branch before it snaps in half, and “We Never Met” would be the tiny slivers of the twig falling to the ground in slow motion. For the future though, the band promises both wailing and whispering on the next full length, due late 2017.