Album of the Week | Shamir: Homo Anxietatem

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I first discovered Shamir’s music through a playlist made by an ex-partner who, one summer before we fell in love with one another, asked me to listen to—among a vast ocean of heavily coded romantic gestures in song form—a track called “Lived and Died Alone.” It was the closing track on Shamir’s first EP Northtown, released in the thick, insurmountable heat of July 2014. “When the sun has set, I will go dig up the dead, lift their bodies from their graves. I’ll lay them in my bed and fill their hollow hearts with all of my broken parts and all the love that they were never shown,” Shamir sang, in a wavering, delicate falsetto over a lone acoustic guitar strum. Few songs in this world have struck me so deeply and so immediately. But, then again, few artists in this world are akin to someone like Shamir.

Likely best known for their 2014 song “On the Regular,” the centerpiece of their debut record Ratchet, the Las Vegas-born, Philly-based singer/songwriter has evolved far beyond the dance-pop purveyor they began as nearly a decade ago. Never before has the idea of genre-busting been more at the forefront of discussion in music-centric circles, and Shamir’s existence within that sphere is largely owed more flowers than they’ve been given. What initially struck me about their work is how that centerpiece falsetto of theirs—an octave any singer worth their salt should be actively striving to mimic—can fit so perfectly into any soundscape it’s paired with. So few artists can achieve such fluidity, and no high-pitched vocalist can make an album full of shoegaze, punk, jazz and indie rock references feel so idiosyncratic.

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Shamir’s ninth album Homo Anxietatem—which was produced by Justin Tailor, Grant Pavol and Teddy Thompson—marks another notch in their pseudo-prolific, never-recycled, still-evolving catalog. Where 2019’s Be the Yee, Here Comes the Haw was an industrial yet soulful album that symbolically nodded to country music and then-recent album titles from Mitski and Mac DeMarco, 2020’s Shamir dove headfirst into shoegaze, synth-pop and rap. Then, last year’s Heterosexuality—which was produced by Hollow Comet—aka Isaac Eiger from Strange Ranger—and you could see his imprint all across the album, as Shamir emblazoned a deft resistance to being pigeonholed, much like Eiger’s own band.

Heterosexuality was a sacred, often uncomfortable text that worked to carve out space to flaunt in a room full of despair and violence. Listening to it was—and still is—no easy task. A track like “Marriage” or “Gay Agenda” both spark with the attitudes of a superstar draped in six-figure gems and blissed to the max with an unbothered lifestyle. But those moments are always sent nose-diving back into the truth, especially on a track like “Cisgender,” when Shamir sings “You wanna kill me? Well, here’s your chance! I can barely get around now as it fucking stands.” When your appearance is willed into a weapon against your existence, there are many questions but such few answers.

And, despite its buoyant and unabashed compositional qualities, Heterosexuality was a raw, honest portrayal of what being a trans person in a country working overtime to erase you looks like—along with being a queer songwriter in an industry not yet ready to burst its bubble swollen with a capitalist-minded, saturated reverence for cookie-cutter LGBTQ+ anthems. Heterosexuality became an essential statement on hopelessness at a time when having hope was demanded of anyone caught beneath the blade of an unruly empire. So, to expect Shamir to return in that same mode on their next album wouldn’t have been an outlandish prediction—as their realistic, unwavering and candid approach to documenting brutality greatly matches what remains incessant beyond the confines of music at-large. But Homo Anxietatem arrives like an aftermath, a proper companion piece to its predecessor—as Shamir arises at the forefront with just as few answers as they had a year ago.

Album opener “Oversized Sweater” is a welcomed introduction, and a rather accessible first foray into Shamir’s work for any new admirers. It’s a gorgeous, shiny indie rock track that is never overwrought with any type of heavy-handedness—and it is named after the big, baby blue sweater that Shamir knitted in 2020 after being discharged from a psych-ward and quitting weed and cigarettes cold turkey. Their singing conjures subtle flickers of country-singer affectations, as they lament a life that’s moving on without them—making timely nods to streaming services and Gen-Z’s contemporary obsession with trinkets while they’re at it. “I listen through the walls to the sound of your pleading calls. I can barely hear my Peacock subscription. I turn the TV down while I mourn the awful sound of a love that has reached its course,” they intone. “So I cuddle in the space of my oversized sweater and sing until I believe in love again.”

Immediately after, “Wandering Through” adopts an anti-anthem shine—as Shamir’s vocals are center-stage, but their guitar-playing turns this standard dream-pop track into a wall of pristine noise. Raw and unfiltered, Shamir doesn’t attempt to make “Wandering Through” into something it’s not; there are no cliché self-help resolutions. At its core, it’s a song about intrusive thoughts and about how the pain we carry sticks with us. “Appearance is a sticky thing that’s tied to how you view yourself and everyone else,” Shamir sings. “Comparison will lead down a road you’ll never find an end to.” The Pavol-penned “Appetizer” is similarly catchy and full of brevity, clocking in at just under a two-minute runtime. Like its lyrics suggest, it’s very much a vignette of a moment that left as quickly as it arrived—a fleeting romance that was never destined to make it off the ground. “In the morning, your eyesight was all blurred by the daylight. You couldn’t say a thing,” Shamir sings, as if they are observing a bedroom they’re already halfway out the door of.

More here than ever before, though, Shamir is tapping into some serious pop sensibilities. At times, the lyrics don’t force themselves into some grand, poetic waxing. Part of being a good constructionist is understanding that a catchy melody is just as important as a quote-worthy one-liner. In turn, a cut like “The Beginning” could wedge its way onto a Y2K coming-of-age flick’s soundtrack because of its accessibility and captivation. “From the first kiss, I was sucked in, but you never thought for a second that we’re so caught up on having a happy ending,” Shamir sings. “We forgot the beginning.” There’s something particularly beautiful about their vocals on this track, especially. The chorus sparkles over and over, the guitar-forward instrumentation exploding like a time capsule construction that is as relenting as it is masterful and melodic.

There are flashes of chart-topping, mainstream architecture here, too. If you told me “The Beginning” went #1 for a week in 2006, I’d fully buy into that proposed arc. In the wake of a project like Heterosexuality, which was rid of optimism and offered some particularly brutal renderings, Homo Anxietatem is much more on a spectrum of joy—at least sonically. Shamir sounds like they’re having a whole lot of fun giving in to the Billboard Hot 100 machine in a winking way—and it’s what helps make the record so unique in their catalog.

“Without You” plugs in these heavy, hard-rock-inspired drum thuds and sharp guitar riffs—as Shamir storyboards everything from their stint in an institution to grappling with how loss and grief are not bound to one moment in time. “I’ve lost my mind many times and I’ll do it again,” they sing. “A break from this reality to remind myself not to play pretend. And I don’t wanna live forever and I thank the stars I won’t. But as we multiply, our bodies die but all the damage carries on.” That last idea is my favorite from Homo Anxietatem altogether, as it calls back to what Shamir was singing about nine years ago on “Lived and Died Alone”—the humanistic desire to interrogate death not at face value, but in the context of how we might continue to care for a soul after its body is buried. To punctuate the gravitational sublimeness of “Without You,” Shamir exudes one of their greatest sonic breakdowns of the last decade—as they harmonize the song’s title over and over in sharp, awing fits of crystalline vocalizations and an out-of-focus-yet-powerful outro guitar solo.

Elsewhere, songs like “Crime” and “Calloused” pair architecture or dance-pop and indie-folk to make intricate, fresh soundscapes come alive. “Obsession” is similarly ambitious, as it’s a rousing hybrid of stadium rock, gym-class-hero punk and Prince-style, guitar-and-groove-focused funk. Shamir’s work on Homo Anxietatem is loud, angry, grounded, delicate and splendid all at once—but it’s not so much a melting pot of different baselines as it is an examination of how an artist might consider articulating their own life and the joys and violences enacted against it through different sizes, shapes and attitudes.

“I can’t be happy, but I can’t hurt. I don’t carry what I subvert. I’m just stuck in my skin, and the only way out is within,” Shamir sings at the end of Homo Anxietatem, on the tongue-in-cheek blues ballad “The Devil Said the Blues is All I’ll Know.” After spending 10 tracks birthing a larger-than-life, distinctive, guitar-based house of walled-up noise and distorted intricacies, only someone as chameleonic as Shamir could flip it all on its head and divest from that destiny, pivoting directly into a period-piece. On Heterosexuality, they compared their life as a Black trans person to Hell; on Homo Anxietatem, they’ve arrived at the crossroads with something much greater to sell than pride.

It’s a fitting finale for the album, as indie rock sounds the way it does because of the decades of work performed by Black people—and the limitlessness that Shamir distills into their genre-bending, indescribable world-building is just as much an act of reclamation as it is a flex. But Homo Anxietatem is a stroke of brilliance not for how many different landscapes Shamir wanders across, but for how generous and relentless in the pursuit of transformation they become as the album unfolds. Anyone can hawk their soul to achieve that same fate, but I highly doubt it’ll sound as remarkable as Shamir’s.

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.