Shamir - Heterosexuality

What more do you want from Shamir? He’s still coming off the 2020 release of his acclaimed self-titled LP that cemented his legacy as a songwriting dynamo; he just dropped a 2021 release of a chapbook of essays which focus on his paintings; and he shepherded a 2021 collaboration between his Accidental Popstar Records imprint with the inimitable Macy Rodman out in the world… Now just 27, the polymathic Las Vegas native and current Philadelphia resident is releasing his 8th full-length album, Heterosexuality. His 2015 debut, Ratchet, focused on the prospect of youth; the following several records helped navigate difficulties with mental health. The new record is the first to confront head-on Shamir’s queerness explicitly in album form. Yet, instead of a pure confirmation of a certain gender politics, he chooses a radical refusal of any sort of categorization--at all. It’s a floating point of rebuff, erasing any ideological identification, further confirming Shamir as the everything-for-everyone antihero of the indie underground.