Four Sight: Samara Cyn is Rejecting All Musical Boundaries
Samara Cyn is experimenting with all genres. We spent time with the rising Los Angeles-based rapper and singer to learn more about her process.
This feature is from Complex Magazine Issue No. 2 - Spring 2025 (The Innovation Issue), which is available now for pre-order on Complex Shop.
Samara Cyn is a self-identified “genre-bender,” following a path she believes has been divinely charted for her.
The 26-year-old Los Angeles-based rapper and singer grew up as a military kid, which meant she lived all across the Southern and Western United States, including Tennessee, Hawaii, Colorado, Texas, and Georgia. Eventually, she established herself in California. Because of all the moving, Cyn never identified with a single genre to shape her music. Instead, she was influenced by the diverse sounds she encountered along the way.
"There's no specific genre that I feel like I gravitate towards. So that's been nice and has left me open for experimentation," Samara Cyn tells Complex. “In Hawaii, listening to island music, or in Texas, while I was in El Paso, where the demographic was predominantly Hispanic—it just opens you up to new things. Even Colorado, being around the whitest of the white people, if you listen to pop music and alternative stuff, you expand your horizons [beyond] what was played just in my household.”
Cyn started recording music while she was at Arizona State University, pivoting from her original path of studying business. “I knew it was risky [pursuing music], but I think I realized that I cared more about being fulfilled in my life than I cared about money or image,” she says.
Ultimately, Samara Cyn wants to feel fulfilled in whatever she’s doing, and that’s powering her musical journey right now. She has already unlocked her lyrical potential and strung together a compelling debut EP with The Drive Home, earninga co-sign from Erykah Badu. All that’s left is continuing to live in her purpose and see where that road takes her.
Where does she want to be a year from now? ”I hope to just be better at what I'm doing, the whole 10,000 hours thing,” she says. “As long as I feel more talented then than I do now, then I'm cool with that.”
