TikTok Star Has New Record Deal, Lambo—and an Adventist Upbringing
- Lehla Samia has 1.3 million fans on TikTok and nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram.
- Her debut music video, “Call on Me,” has more than 2 million views on YouTube.
- In May 2022, she signed a record contract with rapper Yo Gotti’s CMG record label.
29 July 2022 | Lehla Samia has come a long way from singing hymns.
Growing up, Samia used to sing in church. Now at 22, she is an R&B singer with 1.3 million fans on TikTok and nearly 400,000 followers on Instagram. She is also a self-professed Seventh-day Adventist, whose faith is still important to her, reported Delaware Online.
“I need to go back to church. But I still pray every day,” Samia told Delaware Online.
Raised in Delaware, U.S., Samia comes from a close-knit family with two older brothers and parents who have been married for 25 years. “I have very supportive parents. They always try to make it to anything I have going on,” she said.
In 2018, she began uploading videos of her singing on Instagram. Samia said early on she didn’t have much of a following and posted only three videos that year, although her account says her first upload was in March 2019, reported Delaware.
She deleted some of her videos if she felt they didn’t have enough views, but in 2019 she began taking Instagram more seriously. She posted multiple times a week and interacted with her fans.
“I would do this thing where I would go live and I would let people join my live and we would all sing together. This is when my followers started going up,” Samia told Delaware.
Her fan base also increased when she began doing remixes (or “Lehmixes”) of other artist’s songs, including covers of Coi Leray’s “No More Parties” and Queen Naija’s “Butterflies.” The popularity of her remixes led to “Rake it Up” rapper Yo Gotti noticing her.
In May 2022, Gotti signed Samia to his CMG record label, which also includes rappers Blac Youngsta and Moneybagg Yo. Samia is the first R&B artist and first woman to sign with the label, according to Complex. To celebrate, Gotti gave Samia a pink Lamborghini Urus, valued at $300,000 (USD).
“I’m proud to welcome Lehla to the CMG family,” Gotti said. “She has an incredible voice, she’s creatively gifted and she’s been putting in the work to develop into the next R&B superstar.
Also in May, the singer debuted her music video “Call On Me,” which has more than 2 million views on YouTube. This spring, she was on the cover of Billboard Magazine.
Samia is currently working on her new EP, slated to come out before the end of the year, she said.
Samia did not reply to Adventist Today’s requests for comments on what it’s like to be an Adventist in the music industry, or if she’s gotten pushback from other church members on her atypical (for an Adventist) career choice and fashion sense.
But she did tell Delaware Online that perseverance is key to achieving success.
“Trust God’s timing. Be consistent and don’t give up after one post or one song if it didn’t [go viral] because it doesn’t happen like that most of the time. That rarely happens,” she told Delaware. “But just keep going.”
(Photo: Lehla Samia, a TikTok star who recently signed a record deal with CMG, is a self-professed Adventist. Photo via Lehla Samia’s Twitter feed.)