Samantha Urbani | Showing Up | Lucky Number | September 2023
Singer of an early 2010s indie pop band who never got their flowers makes a staggeringly great pop record in 2023 – move over Caroline Polachek. Samantha Urbani, formerly of Brooklyn’s danceable Friends, hews on her long-awaited debut LP Showing Up far closer to bubbly ‘80s synthpop than to the esoteric art pop of Polachek’s lauded Desire, I Want to Turn Into You. While that sort of throwback sound has been the dominant mode of pop music over the past decade, Showing Up isn’t some craven attempt to chase trends and justify a return – it’s Urbani reclaiming a spotlight that should’ve been hers to begin with.
The title track that opens the record is a mission statement – slinky and funky, Urbani’s been clear about the stamp Prince left on that particular track – as she sings, “I’ve walked through a thousand fires / So don’t act like it’s not a miracle I’m even still alive.” For the next 35 minutes, she goes about proving it. “One Day at a Time” follows, the most obvious candidate for radio play (on an album full of potential Songs of the Summer); the verses are delivered in a near sing-speak, over-it tone, culminating with an “ew” stinger right before the first chorus. At that chorus, though, the song expands, leaning into a tight groove as Urbani’s voice spirals upward. When the soaring, swaggering “Fine Line” follows, it seems almost like a corrective. A genuine earworm in the biggest possible way, it’s almost certainly the closest we’ll ever get to Sky Ferreira’s long-promised sophomore LP.
The pairing of “Guiding Star” and “Isolation” signals Showing Up’s pivot toward the dancefloor. On the former, over skittering beats, Urbani whispers her way through an awkward encounter with a crush before handing vocals off to Sasha Desree, who more than makes up for Urbani’s restraint; the latter is one of the album’s two flirtations with disco. It’s a hazier, foggier take on the sound than “Evidence,” foregrounding the beat and reducing Urbani’s voice to a texture vying for the spotlight with synth stabs. “Evidence” is the more convincing of the two, both because it’s subtler and because Urbani sounds far more confident when she gets to cut loose the way she does on the hook.
The weaker tracks on Showing Up, as such, are the ones that diminish Urbani’s presence. “Time Keeps Slipping” builds to a voice-modulated feature from ‘80s cult new-wavers Rexy while Urbani repeats the title like a mantra over squelching synths, leading her to seem like a guest on her own single; the four-and-a-half minute “More Than a Feeling” is the sparest song on the LP – more in line with the singles she’d put out in the previous decade – but she never really uses that extra space to her advantage. By the time the song starts to get colored in, it hasn’t made nearly the impression it needs to stand out between “Evidence” and the wobbly “c u clear.”
By contrast, a song like “c u clear” feels like one that could only be Urbani’s work. Wavy, muddy riffs that sound like DIIV samples punctuate the hook, and all around them, things proceed as usual. Urbani exhales a sultry hook over leapfrogging beats, begs a lover to open up to her, and howls out a ghostly bridge. It’s a bizarre song, a clear synthpop track with a shoegaze warble grafted on: it sounds incredible.
It’s a touch like that, or like the way she drags out the second syllable of the word “honest” a little too long on the chorus of “Common Sense,” or the way she flits between registers on “An Opportunity,” or even the way she slips a “fuck it” into the final seconds of “Showing Up,” that makes Showing Up such a thrilling listen. It was entirely plausible that a record like this – particularly given the number of producers and collaborators and the near-decade it took to finish – could have ended up a desperate last gasp of a would-be pop star, could have been Urbani’s attempt to contort herself to fit the trends of the moment. Instead, it’s a triumph, her bending of pop conventions to serve her will.
Note: This review was originally published in Rantipole.
Zac Djamoos is an editor at The Alternative, and his writing has appeared in Merry-Go-Round Magazine, AbsolutePunk, Funeral Sounds, and more.
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