He worked with several collaborators to help bear out his vision, including indie rock producer Kyle Pulley, who appears on nearly half of the album’s songs. Shamir’s flexible voice imparts joy, yearning, or loss depending on what the moment requires, but the songwriting on Shamir feels newly deft and expressive as well.
“Paranoia seems to be my very best friend,” he quivers softly against a tense, feedback-loaded guitar on “Paranoia” the clashing elements sound like we’re experiencing a sleepless night in his overactive mind right along with him. Shamir’s dexterous, featherlight voice remains his most powerful tool, able to bend from an offhand whisper to a high-pitched singsong and back down to a growl. “I refuse to fucking suffer/Just to feel whole now,” he trills over jagged guitar riffs and blown-out drums on the standout breakup anthem “On My Own.” The song recalls the guitar pop highlights on 2017’s Revelations and this year’s intimate, fuzzed-out Cataclysm, reveling in a sugar-rush chorus that sounds beamed in from ’90s MTV. Often Shamir feels like a pep talk to himself, with lyrics that offer self-assured counters to anxiety, intrusive thoughts, and difficult relationships. An upbeat and vibrant album, Shamir spans alt-rock, folk, synthpop, and country, heightening the drama of each unpredictable genre shift with agile songwriting and steely confidence. Here, Shamir’s esoteric musical impulses meet Ratchet’s more conventional songwriting style without forsaking his carefully built artistry. His uniquely self-reliant catalog represented an effort to divorce the industry and recontextualize himself and his music, mapping out a DIY route to his self-titled seventh album. The Las Vegas native abandoned the glossy dance-pop of his debut, Ratchet, after creative differences prompted a split with indie label XL, and spent six follow-up albums as an “ anti-career artist.” That meant forgoing the pop-star trajectory and returning to the lo-fi, bare-bones folk and country music he first loved as a youth, taking detours through grunge and indie rock along the way. Shamir’s music has undergone a few striking overhauls in the past five years.
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