EP Review: Detour by Samara Cyn
On her third EP in eighteen months, Samara Cyn turns self-knowledge into a weapon she refuses to share. She can see exactly what’s wrong with you, and she’s not going to be the one who fixes it.
If you knew about Samara Cyn, she grew up military, bouncing from Murfreesboro to Augusta to El Paso to Hawaii to Colorado before landing at Arizona State, where she started rapping poems to beats at a weekly open mic. Her mother taught English. Her father put Slick Rick’s The Great Adventures in her hands. On Detour, her third EP, those two influences fight for the same microphone. She writes bars with a poet’s instinct for where a sentence should snap, and she talks trash with a storyteller’s patience. Every insult has a setup, every punchline has a memory behind it.
On “Good Is A LIE,” the Two Fresh and Whit Kane groove rolls thick and unhurried while Cyn croons, trying to figure out whether a man’s silence means peace or indifference. He stopped yelling, stopped raising his voice, and the quiet is worse. “If you don’t care, then who gon’ care about me?” she sings in the first half, and it’s the kind of question that only gets asked when the answer is already obvious. The second half gets reckless—she’s a rocket, she went to public school and not Harvard, she caught red flags and kept giving both feet while he dragged her to hell. “Damn good talker,” she admits, “I don’t even know he real.” The Ovrkast. co-production keeps the drums low and patient, and Cyn matches them, never raising her own voice either, even as the song gets uglier.
Half of Detour runs on nerve. On the high-energy “oooshxt,” Cyn declares people are dead to her, claims she can smell the carcass, calls herself vain and dares somebody to say something about it. “Ladies carryin’ the game, tell the niggas chin up/Nah, actually, tell them motherfuckers they suck.” The Two Fresh and Pera beat throbs underneath her, three hours deep into its own party, and she raps the way someone shows up late on purpose. “BUSHWICK” pushes that confidence further. She warns imitators to follow in her footsteps but their feet won’t fit. The industry, per Cyn, is smothered in dog shit, and everybody’s supposed to be more like her. Ovrkast. steps in and apologizes to Cyn for stepping on the beat before informing biters they’ll get found out. The two of them have a chemistry from years of recording together, and he matches her menace without crowding it.
The whole EP could rest on the back of “over influence” and still stand. The first half moves fast through money and betrayal and distrust, Cyn playing the skeptic who moved it out the pelican, who won’t let a weak-minded woman in her home. Then everything slows down and turns into something else entirely.
“I got PTSD from these overages
I was young when I got out them brokerages
I got set up one time, I ain’t over it
Had to walk out that house with a broken rib.”
The cadence tightens on those lines, rattled off the way someone recounts a story they’ve told themselves a hundred times without finding peace in any of it. And then, without warning, she shifts to second person and starts diagnosing somebody else’s childhood.
“I feel your momma was jealous or worked all the time
Daddy was gone, nigga played with your mind
Childhood sheltered, so teenage years zealous.”
She traces the damage back to its source, understands exactly what this person needs, and refuses to provide it. “I am not the bitch to do it.” That punchline sits at the center of Detour, a locked door. She has the key and she won’t use it.
Somewhere around the third section of “Highest,” Cyn stops praying and starts talking about her life. The opening had asked God to keep her gracious and whole—the Whit Kane beat pitching between something devotional and something anxious, clipped drum work under a synth that can’t decide whether to swell or recede. The autobiography takes over.
“I was broke, I was poor, I had money on the low
Made a bag, ran it up, then I lost it on the tour
Had me feeling like I should’ve kept that corporate gig at home
When I finally made the call, man, they ain’t pick up the phone.”
She gave up a corporate gig, bet everything on music, and when she finally reached back for the safety net nobody picked up the phone.
The bookends tell you where her head is at its most unguarded. “Free” opens Detour—”So kind/All’s well/Confined/Seems fine”—before her voice climbs from a murmur into something desperate and full-lunged, belting “Help me get free” the way you’d yell it at a wall when nobody’s home. “Nomad” closes the EP with Samara singing barely above a whisper, scared to be away from the thing she can’t name for too long because she might lose it forever. “Like up until this point has only been luck,” she sings, and then corrects herself.
“Luck, the distant cousin of design.”
It’s the best line on the record, a proverb she coined on the spot, and it changes the color of everything before it. She’s been moving her whole life, base to base, city to city, open mic to Nas tour to Camp Flog Gnaw, and “Nomad” is the first time she’s stopped long enough to wonder whether any of it was supposed to happen. For a seven-song EP from somebody releasing at a furious pace, nothing here feels rushed or half-considered. Samara Cyn is twenty-something months into her recording career and she already knows exactly how much she should say before she stops talking.
Favorite Track(s): “Good Is A LIE,” “over influence,” “Highest”