Samara Cyn’s voice is the concentrated, soul-touching energy of the Tennessee-born artist: brash, magnetic, and relentlessly introspective. Her sharp pen crafts long, dense verses grounded by gospel backbeats and heartfelt singing. “Writing is like a reminder for me,” Cyn defines her process to me over a Zoom call on an early December afternoon, the sunshine in her room complemented by a scented candle. “It’s a reflection and reminder. I probably wouldn’t say that I’m a super positive person overall, but you have to stay hopeful.”
The 27-year-old wordsmith discovered her rap intuition in early adulthood, an unexpected path for the military kid who was raised in many different places. “The journey has been cool so far. It’s not like I’ve wanted to be a rapper since I was a kid. I got into it in my adulthood. I didn’t have expectations.” She admits the journey can feel like “a blessing and a curse,” yet she finds validation in its personal rewards: “[Music] is growing my confidence as a person, the security I have as a human being.”
Cyn’s art is a soul-bearing exercise, transforming raw emotion from her life into verse. Her debut 2024 album, The Drive Home, channels the experiences of her nomadic youth into the conceptual scenery of a nighttime commute, with tracks like “Entry #149” serving as a call for self-healing from pain, often punctuated by a gospel choir. “My only job is just to make sure that I’m being really honest,” she asserts.
Her catalog consistently wavers between moments of lyrical wit illustrating joyful experiences and contemplative ruminations on human struggle, world peace, and chasing life’s horizon. Her most recent EP, Backroads, flexes her versatility, showing she can pivot from a retro melody coursing with summer nostalgia to a full-on stunt to display her rap muscle. Cyn is a poet who constantly sharpens her pen with a mouthful of ideas expressing her evolving faith in herself and the world. She shares a neo-soul approach with her best-loved artists, including Erykah Badu, Lauryn Hill, Outkast, and Lupe Fiasco, treating rap performance as a vessel for charged moments of emotion.
Cyn strips down the musical composition in recent tracks like “vitamins n minerals” and “pop n olive” to allow the lyricism to speak for itself. On December 12, she released “What Will They Say”—a pick-your-head-up mantra packaged with crafty lyricism and angelic background vocals. The track boasts the can-do attitude of an artist who understands human frailty. “Life is really disheartening at times, and it’s really exhausting at times,” Cyn relates. “The music is either me expressing that feeling or me trying to be hopeful about the things that are going on and reminding myself and talking to myself.”
By consistently laying bare the everyday struggles humans face, Samara Cyn is undeniably on her way to new heights, becoming a universal voice for a generation of contemplative thinkers and moral doers.