SAM SHI shares ‘Comfort Zone,’ the lone new song on her live acoustic EP ‘Live From Santa Monica,’ out October 9 via But Did You Dance
SAM SHI has spent the summer as the voice inside other people’s records. Now she wants you to hear the room. On Friday, the Los Angeles artist released “Comfort Zone,” a new single on her own label, But Did You Dance, and the only unreleased song on Live From Santa Monica, a live acoustic EP and performance film arriving October 9. It is the clearest look yet at the songwriter who usually lives inside a kick drum.
The timing is deliberate. In recent months she has sung on Nico Szabo and Aske Izan’s “Aside” for Anjunadeep Explorations and on Enamour’s “What U Said” for Crosstown Rebels, two labels near the center of melodic dance music. “Comfort Zone” doesn’t abandon that world. It runs alongside it.
One Session on the Coast
The EP came from a single session on the California coast. SAM SHI and her band played the songs straight through and let a camera catch whatever happened.
“Comfort Zone” was the one new song born that day. The other five, “Judgment,” “Perfectionism,” “Unbury Me,” “PETTY,” and “No Love,” already exist in her catalog. Here they return in the shape they take on a stage, closer to the room than to the record.
That shift is starker than it sounds. “Unbury Me” first arrived in July 2025 as a melodic house track, complete with an extended mix built for DJs, and much of her earlier catalog lived in that same late-night, four-on-the-floor territory. Hearing those songs with the club architecture removed feels like reading a diary that used to be set to a strobe light.
Leaving the Safe Room
“Comfort Zone” is a song about refusal. For most of her life, she says, comfort meant “needing someone else in the room,” whether that was a partner or a job. She spent a decade building a career in tech, one she says she doesn’t regret, before realizing it had become a hiding place too. The song marks the moment she stopped hiding and started pointing her energy toward music as a mission.
Her path makes that story feel earned. Born in Honolulu and raised in Sweden, she studied physics and interactive media, worked in tech, and became a certified yoga teacher. That search for connection sits at the center of her music, which moves between alternative songwriting and underground electronic culture, between control and surrender, the mind and the body. Around the start of 2025, she rebranded as SAM SHI, a change she has described as a way of reclaiming her Chinese heritage.
The independence is part of the point. Asked by Numéro Netherlands why she releases through her own label, she answered with a joke first: “Because I’m an Aries and no one can tell me what to do, LOL.” Then came the real answer. She didn’t want to wait for anyone else’s permission to decide her art was worth sharing.
What comes next might surprise anyone who hears this EP as a turn away from the dancefloor. In the same interview, she said she’s most excited to make more genre-fluid dance-pop records and to dance with people around the world.
A lyric video for “Comfort Zone” is on the way, and the full performance film arrives alongside the EP.
Maybe that’s the real lesson here. Stepping out of a comfort zone doesn’t mean leaving the club. It means walking back in with nothing to hide behind.
