Sami Rahman

Sami Rahman is a Philadelphia singer, songwriter and producer. Born in Philadelphia in 1994 to first-generation immigrant parents, Sami quickly developed a love for music. His early taste was shaped by his parents, by his dad's love of The Cure and The Smiths, and his mom's love of Bob Marley and Youssou N'dour. In high school, he started playing the drums, playing in a few punk bands with friends.


In 2013, he started teaching himself to play the guitar, and began writing songs. He continued to write, and began to sing, as he started attending Temple University that year. In 2016 he started putting self-recorded music online under the name Mattress Food. He dropped a few albums of melodic, lo-fi indie rock under the Mattress Food name, before recruiting some friends to play live, eventually turning the project into an official group.


In 2019, feeling stifled creatively by the rock music he was making under the Mattress Food name, and having a strong love of hip-hop and r&b, Sami started releasing solo music under his own name. He dropped his Birdboy EP that spring, a collection of melancholic beats and melodies that he produced himself. Over the course of that summer, he dropped about a dozen singles that he had been working on, in an array of styles ranging from synth-pop to straight rapping, to woeful, hazy r&b ballads. In early 2020, he released Sink Deep Down, an experimental EP, and All On Me, a sad hip-hop EP.