Sasami Ashworth has had me on the phone for less than a minute before she tells me to get up out of my chair.
"Okay, here's a calisthenics exercise activity that's going to keep you warm for the next 30 minutes," she says after I tell her my radiators are on the fritz on a day that's dipping something close to -35 degrees. "Okay, ready? Alright. 30 seconds of burpees — go."
She's joking, obviously, but there's a mote of seriousness that floats in the suggestion. After all, there's no use in sitting around thinking about how cold you are. Why not try doing something about it?
This sort of challenge — a well-intentioned finger to the back, the necessary nudge at the lip of a sky-diving plane — is the dominant force behind Squeeze, Ashworth's spellbinding sophomore record as SASAMI. Woven through the album's slapstick humour and heightened metal fantasy is a very real proposal (a friendly demand, really) to move, to thrash, to explode.
"You know, I can only speak for myself, but when I'm in kind of a dark place, there's a couple ways you can go," she explains over the phone from her hometown of Los Angeles. "You can let yourself feel bad and get really down and bring your energy really low and slow, or you can try to turn it around and become positive and find the silver lining."
"Or," she continues, her voice rising slightly as she rounds the corner to her favoured option, "you could just get enraged and air your frustration out."
Squeeze is a rager, the kind of album that puts holes through drywall and sends houses spinning off their foundations. Across a smorgasbord of sounds — metal, country pop, industrial dance music, folk, orchestral dirges and epic balladry — Ashworth tackles the concept of becoming unhinged in the literal sense, tearing the door from its frame and leaving it open for whoever else may want to pass through into the hot dark.
"I think I wanted to create a sonic landscape where people could choose door number three a little bit more, and not try to pick themselves up off the floor, necessarily," she says. "Not try to be like, 'everything's gonna be okay,' and not wallow in their pity, but actually snap into some sort of violent action."
The record opens on a fantasy of that violent action — "In a skin a rat mood / Cut 'em, crush 'em / Big, big boot" — and its visual world is alive with violence, drawn with brutal, glittering precision by visual artist Andrew Thomas Huang, who's worked with the likes of Björk, FKA twigs and Thom Yorke.
On the album's cover, Ashworth's face is grafted onto the coiled body of Japanese water spirit Nure-onna, her scorpion appendages beckoning. She's drawing you in for the kill, but it's hard not to read her extended limbs as an invitation of sorts, too — come over here and fuck some shit up.
"I definitely was really inspired by a lot of Japanese horror and spooky Japanese art in the conjuring of the album in general, but I think this Nure-onna character is just the one that I connected with the most when I was looking at these different images, just trying to get, like, emotional inspiration," Ashworth says.
"I mean, she's literally, like, a watery bitch with long black hair," she continues. "And I'm like, okay… my water sign queen! I'm a Cancer and grew up at the beach. I'm a very oceanic, watery kind of person. So I just automatically connected with the spirit of this kind of villainous water creature that tricks and murders its victims. I thought it was cute. And, you know, wanted to put my face on one, so Andrew let me do that."
These avatars — the Nure-onna and the "hot femme with a mystical flamethrower engulfed in emotional blue flames" that accompanied the release of grinding single "Say It" — are extensions of the album's insistence on fantasy, opportunities to escape to a world more vicious and pleasurable and brightly coloured than our own. And as for whether there are more avatars on the way, Ashworth simply says, "They're coming."
"Since the whole album was made in lockdown, anyone who was making art — unless they were an evil person who went to those secret raves or whatever — was making it out of emotional memories and memories of experiences," Ashworth explains. "Because we weren't doing anything! We weren't meeting anyone new, we weren't going anywhere. We weren't having experiences."
She continues, "So it inherently kind of pushed me to make this more fantasy-inspired album. You know, fantasizing about spiralling out of control, fantasizing about avenging and revenging wrongs, and fantasizing about negative, violent, emotional spirals. It just kind of naturally lent itself to a time of making fantasy art. I wasn't writing about making spaghetti squash."
That sensation of boundlessness —"because there was nothing going on, I was able to go anywhere" — is reflected in the album's music as much as it is in the twisted fantasia that Ashworth's built to hold it.
From the billowing, ascendant indie rock of "Call Me Home" to the Fleetwood Mac by way of Meat Puppets gallop of "Make It Right" or the metal mantra of the No Home-featuring title-track, Squeeze lashes out in any and all directions. Ashworth's keen ear and dynamic, patchwork-quilt production manage to thread a silvery line of cohesion through a dozen disparate sounds and moods.
When asked how she knows an album — particularly one as bursting with ideas as Squeeze — is finally complete, Ashworth speaks plainly, her penchant for make-believe left behind in the music.
"I think you just run out of money to pay people to work on it. And then it's done," she says, laughing. "I think you could keep working on it forever. And to be completely honest, I feel like when I'm making anything, I'm thinking of the $30 million version of it. And I'm always making the extremely compromised version of it. Which sounds kind of dark, but it's not dark. It's totally fine. And once I have perspective from it, I step back and go, 'Oh, this is great. I'm proud of what I made.'"
Squeeze may not be the most expensive record made this year, but it sounds undeniably fantastic, finding furious joy in tension and whiplash, a sparking, netherworld roller coaster of an album.
"I think that I really tapped into my music teacher brain," Ashworth says when asked about the intended effect that Squeeze might have on listeners, an experience she describes as "being subbed by the album."
"I was a music teacher for a long time before I was touring and making music full-time. And in that world, your whole aim is to just keep everyone's attention as much as possible. You're like, a clown-professor fairy-person, just running around," she says. "I wanted to create something that keeps the listener on their toes, and made sure that the pacing of the album does that and keeps everyone kind of surprised and engaged. Basically, I'm treating adults like five-year-olds."
It's easy to be swallowed by the album's unrelenting presence, to be knocked to the floor by its changing tides. But crucially, it never feels like you're being defeated when it takes you down. Instead, it suggests you start tearing at the floorboards, digging into your established foundations — there are still new places to go once you've hit the ground.
It's about giving the listener the choice — the space — to join in the reverie. "It's not me creating art down to people, but me reaching out and being like, 'I'm gonna meet you more than halfway,'" she says. "And you can watch or walk away. I don't really care. I'm gonna be doing my thing.'"
"Okay, here's a calisthenics exercise activity that's going to keep you warm for the next 30 minutes," she says after I tell her my radiators are on the fritz on a day that's dipping something close to -35 degrees. "Okay, ready? Alright. 30 seconds of burpees — go."
She's joking, obviously, but there's a mote of seriousness that floats in the suggestion. After all, there's no use in sitting around thinking about how cold you are. Why not try doing something about it?
This sort of challenge — a well-intentioned finger to the back, the necessary nudge at the lip of a sky-diving plane — is the dominant force behind Squeeze, Ashworth's spellbinding sophomore record as SASAMI. Woven through the album's slapstick humour and heightened metal fantasy is a very real proposal (a friendly demand, really) to move, to thrash, to explode.
"You know, I can only speak for myself, but when I'm in kind of a dark place, there's a couple ways you can go," she explains over the phone from her hometown of Los Angeles. "You can let yourself feel bad and get really down and bring your energy really low and slow, or you can try to turn it around and become positive and find the silver lining."
"Or," she continues, her voice rising slightly as she rounds the corner to her favoured option, "you could just get enraged and air your frustration out."
Squeeze is a rager, the kind of album that puts holes through drywall and sends houses spinning off their foundations. Across a smorgasbord of sounds — metal, country pop, industrial dance music, folk, orchestral dirges and epic balladry — Ashworth tackles the concept of becoming unhinged in the literal sense, tearing the door from its frame and leaving it open for whoever else may want to pass through into the hot dark.
"I think I wanted to create a sonic landscape where people could choose door number three a little bit more, and not try to pick themselves up off the floor, necessarily," she says. "Not try to be like, 'everything's gonna be okay,' and not wallow in their pity, but actually snap into some sort of violent action."
The record opens on a fantasy of that violent action — "In a skin a rat mood / Cut 'em, crush 'em / Big, big boot" — and its visual world is alive with violence, drawn with brutal, glittering precision by visual artist Andrew Thomas Huang, who's worked with the likes of Björk, FKA twigs and Thom Yorke.
On the album's cover, Ashworth's face is grafted onto the coiled body of Japanese water spirit Nure-onna, her scorpion appendages beckoning. She's drawing you in for the kill, but it's hard not to read her extended limbs as an invitation of sorts, too — come over here and fuck some shit up.
"I definitely was really inspired by a lot of Japanese horror and spooky Japanese art in the conjuring of the album in general, but I think this Nure-onna character is just the one that I connected with the most when I was looking at these different images, just trying to get, like, emotional inspiration," Ashworth says.
"I mean, she's literally, like, a watery bitch with long black hair," she continues. "And I'm like, okay… my water sign queen! I'm a Cancer and grew up at the beach. I'm a very oceanic, watery kind of person. So I just automatically connected with the spirit of this kind of villainous water creature that tricks and murders its victims. I thought it was cute. And, you know, wanted to put my face on one, so Andrew let me do that."
These avatars — the Nure-onna and the "hot femme with a mystical flamethrower engulfed in emotional blue flames" that accompanied the release of grinding single "Say It" — are extensions of the album's insistence on fantasy, opportunities to escape to a world more vicious and pleasurable and brightly coloured than our own. And as for whether there are more avatars on the way, Ashworth simply says, "They're coming."
"Since the whole album was made in lockdown, anyone who was making art — unless they were an evil person who went to those secret raves or whatever — was making it out of emotional memories and memories of experiences," Ashworth explains. "Because we weren't doing anything! We weren't meeting anyone new, we weren't going anywhere. We weren't having experiences."
She continues, "So it inherently kind of pushed me to make this more fantasy-inspired album. You know, fantasizing about spiralling out of control, fantasizing about avenging and revenging wrongs, and fantasizing about negative, violent, emotional spirals. It just kind of naturally lent itself to a time of making fantasy art. I wasn't writing about making spaghetti squash."
That sensation of boundlessness —"because there was nothing going on, I was able to go anywhere" — is reflected in the album's music as much as it is in the twisted fantasia that Ashworth's built to hold it.
From the billowing, ascendant indie rock of "Call Me Home" to the Fleetwood Mac by way of Meat Puppets gallop of "Make It Right" or the metal mantra of the No Home-featuring title-track, Squeeze lashes out in any and all directions. Ashworth's keen ear and dynamic, patchwork-quilt production manage to thread a silvery line of cohesion through a dozen disparate sounds and moods.
When asked how she knows an album — particularly one as bursting with ideas as Squeeze — is finally complete, Ashworth speaks plainly, her penchant for make-believe left behind in the music.
"I think you just run out of money to pay people to work on it. And then it's done," she says, laughing. "I think you could keep working on it forever. And to be completely honest, I feel like when I'm making anything, I'm thinking of the $30 million version of it. And I'm always making the extremely compromised version of it. Which sounds kind of dark, but it's not dark. It's totally fine. And once I have perspective from it, I step back and go, 'Oh, this is great. I'm proud of what I made.'"
Squeeze may not be the most expensive record made this year, but it sounds undeniably fantastic, finding furious joy in tension and whiplash, a sparking, netherworld roller coaster of an album.
"I think that I really tapped into my music teacher brain," Ashworth says when asked about the intended effect that Squeeze might have on listeners, an experience she describes as "being subbed by the album."
"I was a music teacher for a long time before I was touring and making music full-time. And in that world, your whole aim is to just keep everyone's attention as much as possible. You're like, a clown-professor fairy-person, just running around," she says. "I wanted to create something that keeps the listener on their toes, and made sure that the pacing of the album does that and keeps everyone kind of surprised and engaged. Basically, I'm treating adults like five-year-olds."
It's easy to be swallowed by the album's unrelenting presence, to be knocked to the floor by its changing tides. But crucially, it never feels like you're being defeated when it takes you down. Instead, it suggests you start tearing at the floorboards, digging into your established foundations — there are still new places to go once you've hit the ground.
It's about giving the listener the choice — the space — to join in the reverie. "It's not me creating art down to people, but me reaching out and being like, 'I'm gonna meet you more than halfway,'" she says. "And you can watch or walk away. I don't really care. I'm gonna be doing my thing.'"
