Winter w/ Hooky

The singer-songwriter and guitarist has been a mainstay in Los Angeles’ music scene for over a decade, carving out her own niche of gloriously detailed and eclectic dream pop under the name Winter. After growing up in Curitiba, Brazil and playing in her first bands in Boston, she relocated to Los Angeles in 2013 and fell in love with the city. She found a sense of belonging in its DIY rock community—the basement of her longtime Echo Park home was host to countless shows and even Winter’s first practices—and she grew attached to L.A.’s cosmic, inspiring aura. But at a certain point, Samira was craving a change of scenery to facilitate self-growth, a painful, but necessary realization that brought about a move to New York City. Leading up to her emotional coast-to-coast move, she spent roughly two years writing songs in a transitory state: often in between tours, in different cities, and in various sublets. The resulting 13 tracks became her new LP, Adult Romantix—her Winspear debut, the follow-up to 2022’s landmark What Kind of Blue Are You?, and a goodbye love letter to her time in L.A.

 

What Kind of Blue Are You? was, in her words, “a total reset”—a dark, healing, and intensely personal record that cemented Winter’s unique musical language. As Samira began to confront the end of her decade-plus in L.A., she was overcome by waves of memories and nostalgia, which stirred feelings of pure-hearted reverence for her 20s—catching shows at The Echo, driving through Southern California, and soaking in the blistering sun for so long that you start to feel existential and an impending sense of doom. So, instead of exorcising inner demons, this time around, Samira visited the ghosts of heartfelt memories, which had spilled into her present reality. She describes Adult Romantix as “a tunnel of summers and memories,” inspired by romantic-period texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, as well as ‘90s rom-coms—indulging in heady melodrama and romantic and platonic longing, while also embracing a lighthearted, youthful innocence.

 

To go along with these meditations, Samira channeled a textured, yearning indie rock sound that squared with her vision of “a lost L.A. summer”—a departure from the electronic experimentation of her 2024 EP …and she’s still listening, penned around the same time. While What Kind of Blue Are You? was inspired by ‘90s dream pop classics, Adult Romantix was influenced by touchstones like Sonic Youth’s Rather Ripped, the forlorn acoustic rock of Elliott Smith, the slippery electronic-rock of Dean Blunt, and California shoegaze à la Further and Starflyer 59. Marked by swirling, drive-pedal squalls and open-tuned acoustic guitar, there’s a palpable bittersweetness to these raw, lovesick tunes. Blurred daydreams and a sense of brooding introspection pervade the record—from dizzying tape echo and icy breakbeats to Samira’s androgynous, pitched-down, cigarette-glazed vocals. Vacillating between dewy, strummy ecstasy and moody, nighttime desire, Adult Romantix thrives on escapism, always delightfully in the clouds and often sonically peculiar.