Samantha Urbani is a vocalist, songwriter, producer, and multi-media visual artist. A self-taught musician raised in an eclectic home-schooling family, she values creative intuition and personal expression on equal grounds with technical craftsmanship. She wrote the songs for her first band, Friends, while studying media theory and documentary filmmaking at New York’s Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at The New School, and while in an intensive music history course at Berlin’s Freie Universität.

Friends quickly became a staple of the New York indie scene of the early 2010s, and spent several years bridging their DIY roots into pop culture, headlining tours and festivals extensively across the world and in the U.S., gaining international radio play, and signing deals with both indie and major labels (Fat Possum Records, Sony/EMI). Urbani’s work with Friends as well as her solo music have received glowing reviews from the likes of The New York Times, The Guardian, Pitchfork, NME, Rolling Stone, MTV and Vogue. She became known not only for her engaging live performances and political lyricism woven into catchy pop songs with post-punk grit, but also for her individual DIY fashion sense and social activism.

Following Friends, Urbani collaborated and performed live with the music project Blood Orange for several years, with whom she played at major international festivals and on live late night TV. She also hosted a web series on experimental electronic music, Sound Builders, for VICE’s technology channel Motherboard, and founded a reissue record label, URU. She now continues to create solo music, produce live events, and regularly collaborates with major brands and fellow musicians.

Known for her ecstatic live stage presence and organic ability to conjoin underground culture with the immediacy of pop songwriting, and her continued goal of helming an inclusive/diverse community with her event programming, Urbani has been a staple of the New York music scene and beyond for the past decade.