Blood on Me

During this brooding track, Sampha sings about running away from something in what appears to be a dream I see this lake formin' I got lost astray In this forest runnin' away I slip up, I'm on the edge now They see me, and I nearly I nearly lose my grip, but you held on to me And you shake me, and tell me that I'm okay He explained to Genius: "The writing is not sensical. At the end of each verse, someone is waking me up. There is that comforting person, someone waking me up out of the dream. And it's more like the visual I imagined. The thing of being shaken or dragged. So as much as it is comforting, it is also like violent actions as well. It's more so how I see it. I write things like a movie scene. I kind of see the camera angle, and there is someone sort of shaking me out - a birds eye view of my bed. So there is that thing of someone there to save you from yourself. Or to wake you up out of the dream. It's like a dog chasing its tail. You never really know where it ends."

Sampha recalled the story of the song: "I was in the studio with this guy called Radai McDonald. He was helping me engineer and ended up co-producing my record with me. And we were recording a really long piano take. It was like 20, 30 minutes of piano playing and this song just came out of that. I kind of murmured the lyrics, and the hook was in there, and it sort of just came out. I remember in the studio, we had like a projection on the piano I was playing. There was waves crashing, and we were watching Ghost In the Shell, and all these things. It just evoked this feeling. I just imagined me running away from, I don't know, something. That was like the first lyric: 'I swear they smell the blood on me.' So I built the song around that."