A Review of SAMSARA’s New Release ‘SWORDFIGHT’ EP
SAMSARA – Swordfight EP
ONE TO WATCH!!
In 2025, Samsara became the first transgender musician to tour schools across the UK. She performed her empowering pop songs and talked about her own experiences of navigating the classroom: coming out, identity, anti-bullying, mental health, the importance of creating environments where young people can exist without being diminished. She was twenty-one years old, studying at King's College London, and already using her platform in ways that most artists twice her age have not considered.
Swordfight, her new EP, is the fullest creative statement of who she is and what she is building. Australian-born, raised in Hong Kong, based in London: Samsara brings to the project a genuinely international formation and a singular approach to contemporary pop. Maximalist electronic production. Theatrical visual identity. Emotionally charged songwriting that allows vulnerability and bravado to inhabit the same space without either compromising the other. Difficult experiences become, across these tracks, fuel for something celebratory rather than merely confessional.
Focus track 'Stab 'n Smile' is the EP's most immediate entry point. Synth-driven electro-pop with propulsive production and lyrics that cut considerably deeper than the infectious surface suggests: Samsara's vocal delivery commanding throughout, giving the track its own unmistakable character within familiar melodic synth territory. For an artist who typically writes and records quickly, this song was an exception. It remained with her for more than a year, its subject, her relationship with her changing body and the experience of changing alongside it, requiring time and honesty that faster processes could not have produced. The result is the EP's most emotionally resonant moment: reassurance for anyone navigating their own version of the same territory.
Swordfight builds a pop world on Samsara's own terms, which means refusing the single definition that would make her easier to describe and considerably less interesting to listen to. Personal without becoming restrained. Theatrical without losing its emotional core. An artist who has done real work on the subjects her music addresses, and made that work audible.
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