LOS ANGELES — For most of 2020, Sasami didn’t feel like it was the right time for her to make music.
A year after the singer and producer released her self-titled debut, a collection of electro-inflected indie rock, the Covid-19 pandemic raged and a racial reckoning raised important questions. So she paused and studied. Sasami’s background is in classical music, but while in seclusion, she taught herself about black cultural appropriation and taught subjects like the blues and minstrels. “My takeaway,” she said in an interview on the patio of her northeast Los Angeles home, “was that I wanted to appropriate white, male music.”
Specifically, she wanted to tackle metal. “It’s such a cis white men’s space,” she added, sipping tea at a picnic table on a bright but chilly January afternoon. She wore a thick sweater over her cropped sailor top. “There’s room for someone like me to come in and make a mess.”
The result is “Squeeze,” a Friday album that feels both darkly menacing and overtly sincere. Sasami takes on the role of tormentor and tormentor, grappling with a world that can be emotionally overwhelming in so many ways. †I wanted it to have this chaotic energy as opposed to just evil energy,” she said.
“Squeeze” was largely shot in the home of an impossibly steep hill in the wooded area of Mount Washington, which Sasami shares with fellow musicians Meg Duffy, who records as Hand Habits, and Kyle Thomas, best known for his work as King Tuff. For a year they worked together on each other’s recent and upcoming albums, with Sasami producing all three.
Sasami, 31, is pleasant and measured in conversations, but she has a wild flair in her appearance that is even more pronounced on stage. That afternoon she had placed three crystal rhinestones above each ledge where an eyebrow would normally sit. A thin red line danced across each of her eyelids and down the sides of her face.
While her debut album tended towards understated sounds, her turn to metal isn’t as surprising as it seems. While promoting “Sasami,” she constantly rammed against prejudice. “I was touring with an all queer femme band and every sound guy said, ‘Turn down your amps,'” she said. “Inherently, that just makes me want to play harder.”
The night in February 2020 before Sasami left for a songwriters residence in Hedgebrook, a remote retreat ranch off the coast of Washington where women and non-binary writers live, Thomas convinced her to join Barishi, a muscular metal band from his Brattleboro, Vt. ., birthplace. “I literally had a spiritual experience,” she said. “I was moshing alone in this downtown dive bar.” Barishi now plays as her live backing band.
When some of Sasami’s friends learned of her plans to make a metal album, there were concerns. “She writes such beautiful music that I was really concerned that she was going down a weird path and it was just a fleeting interest for her,” said Michelle Zauner, the author and musician who performs as Japanese Breakfast. “I felt really bad about doubting her because what she came up with combines this timeless, beautiful quality of her natural songwriting with something very unique and aggressive.”
This final progression is another point in Sasami’s unpredictable trajectory. Born Sasami Ashworth, she grew up in the South Bay town of El Segundo, California. She describes her father as “a white baby boomer” who would burn her CDs full of acts like Steely Dan, the Beatles and Fleetwood Mac. Her mother’s side of the family is Zainichi, ethnic Koreans who came or were brought to Japan during the colonial occupation. “My mother, like most Korean parents, gave me piano lessons when I was 5 years old,” Sasami said.
In high school, she switched to horn to distinguish herself from all the girls who wanted to play the flute or clarinet. “I specifically chose the French horn to be uncomfortable,” she said. “It was the weirdest instrument you could pick.”
She attended Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, along with members of Empress Of’s Haim and Lorely Rodriguez, where she “listened to nu metal and Elliott Smith and went through all the normal teenage stages, while also practicing scales and auditioning every day.” for conservatories,” Sasami said.
After graduating from the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, Sasami returned to Los Angeles, where she worked as a music teacher in classrooms and led “Mommy and Me” group sessions. She also began assisting Nate Walcott, a member of the group Bright Eyes who composes for movies and TV shows. She joined the post-punk band Cherry Glazerr as a synth player, eventually quitting her teaching job so she could tour full-time.
“It was hard to stop because as a music teacher you know your job is good,” she said. “As a musician you don’t know every day whether it is a noble profession.”
It wasn’t until 2017 that Sasami started writing her own songs, in part so that she would have something to use as practice material for producing music. “Morning Comes” on her debut is the first song she ever wrote. “I wasn’t trying to invent anything new,” she said of her first album. “It came from a much more diary-like place.”
With ‘Squeeze’ she wanted to take a more dynamic approach to better match her self-described ‘chaotic clown-y energy’. But sometimes, even as she pushed her compositions to her more confrontational tendencies, the arrangements wouldn’t obey. “The thing about songs is they’re like kids,” she said. “You can say, ‘I want you to be a hockey player. I want you to be a ballerina.’ You can enroll them in the classes, but if they don’t want to, you can’t force them to be.”
While “Squeeze” may include genre signifiers such as double kick drums and slap bass, it’s far from a typical metal album. Hair pulverization The cover of Daniel Johnston’s “Sorry Entertainer” features a passionate guitar solo with finger taps and exuberant screams, but as the music fades, you can hear Sasami’s resulting coughing fit. Various influences pulse through the LP, such as the glam rock boogie of “Make It Right”, the swirling electronic textures on “Call Me Home” or the power ballad tendencies of “The Greatest” and “Not a Love Song”.
With its loud and proud strumming of acoustic guitars, “Tried to Understand” offers one of the album’s most lighthearted moments. The original version featured instruments by fuzz enthusiasts Ty Segall, who co-produced several “Squeeze” songs, and Dinosaur Jr.’s J Mascis. “I tried my best to make it a heavy rock song, but the song was like, make me a Sheryl Crow pop song,” Sasami said.
She compared ‘Squeeze’ to a haunted house where every room is different, or a corn maze where you don’t know where the next turn will take you, and traced this impulse to her time in education. “That’s the job of a music teacher, to always keep the kids surprised in a place of whimsy and fantasy,” she said. “I really felt like a fairy with a recorder and a guitar.”