SASAMI Releases New Single 'Just Be Friends' From New Album

SASAMI shares “Just Be Friends,” the addictive new single from her recently announced audacious and epic new album, Blood On the Silver Screen, out March 7, 2025 via Domino. On the album, the polymath combines her classical conservatory-trained skills as a player, producer, and composer with her fearless and bombastic stage persona to create her most realized music to date: the all-out SASAMI pop record. 

Across Blood On the Silver Screen, SASAMI’s lyrics narrate the ecstasies and agonies of being a modern lover, “relenting to illogical passion, obsession, and guiltless pleasure,” SASAMI says, “leaning into the chaos of romance and sweeping devotion—romanticism to the point of self-destruction.” The irrepressible “Just Be Friends” bottles the dizzying longing that can overtake the in-betweens of modern intimacy.

“‘Just Be Friends’ feels like a really grown up continuation of themes/moods from my first two albums. I returned to some of the stream of consciousness, emotional lyrical writing style of my first album and kept riding the country wave that was in the fabric of Squeeze but with a bit more modern country influence,” SASAMI explains. “I love how country songs often tell a story. Longing, lingering, loneliness and lust. When I play this one live I always dedicate it to anyone ‘sad and horny’ in the crowd… if that means anything.”

Working with co-producers Jenn Decilveo and Rostam, with SASAMI as sole writer, each Blood On the Silver Screen track viscerally captures a different thread of love, sex, power, and embodiment. “Pop music is like fuel,” Sasami says. “It’s just invigorating.” Eschewing today’s pop zeitgeist, Sasami gravitated towards late aughts and 2010s pop a la Britney Spears’ Femme Fatale and Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, plus Kelly Clarkson, Katy Perry, and Sia. She was influenced by modern country storytelling, mixing vulnerability with humor, and the mood board also included Prince, Japanese city pop, and the stadium-sized, denim-clad iconography of Bruce Springsteen. SASAMI is currently on the road with Destroy Boys. 

Tour Dates with Destroy Boys:

11/14 - Boston, MA @ Paradise Rock Club

11/15 - Philadelphia, PA @ Union Transfer

11/16 - New York, NY @ Webster Hall

11/17 - Washington, DC @ 9:30 Club

11/18 - Carrboro, NC @ Cat’s Cradle

11/20 - Atlanta, GA @ The Masquerade

11/22 - Houston, TX @ Warehouse Live Midtown

11/23 - San Antonio, TX @ Paper Tiger

11/24 - McAllen, TX @ Cine El Rey

Now in her early 30s, Sasami didn’t grow up listening to much pop music, and even felt pressures to avoid it. “I was always a weirdo outsider and I didn’t feel like pop music spoke to me,” she said. “Being a woman of color, I’ve always felt this pressure or need to make something that’s mysterious or innovative, and always shied away from lightheartedness.” But she also sees Blood On the Silver Screen’s embrace of pleasure as a kind of personal reclamation. Raised in Los Angeles in the “conservative religious cult” of the Unification Church, her senses of herself and her sexuality were skewed. “My relationship to love and sex was so tied into these repressive, super restrictive definitions,” she says. The album is an extension of her process of coming into herself as part of a generation unbeholden to conventions around love, sex, or the nuclear family. “This album for me is about having deep, meaningful relationships within a new definition of what is good, what is right, and what is powerful,” she says. “We are still passionate beings.”

“I wanted to go all out with this album,” Sasami continues. “I wanted to, in my tenderness and emotionality, have the bravery to undertake something as epic as making a pop record about love. I hope it makes people feel empowered and embodied, too. It’s important to not box yourself in."

Photo Credit: Miriam Marlene

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