Philadelphia’s Vegas-born multidisciplinary indie rock artist Shamir has announced his new album Heterosexuality due out February 11, 2022.
With the announcement comes soaring lead single “Cisgender” alongside a stoic & confrontational video. Everyone’s invited, but Shamir isn’t putting up with bullshit as he almost howls in his upper register: “I’m not cisgender/ I’m not binary, trans/ I don’t wanna be a girl/ I don’t wanna be a man/ I’m just existing on this god forsaken land/ And you can take it or leave it or you can just stay back.” Shamir shares, “I think this album is me finally acknowledging my trauma. Everyone knows I’ve been through so much shit and I kind of just rammed through, without really acknowledging the actual trauma that I do feel on almost a daily basis.” The new track follows last month’s acclaimed industrial art-rock single “Gay Agenda”.
Reimagining 90’s Pop & Rock for the modern world is Shamir’s DNA. Expertly melding industrial synth with sticky pop hooks, the thread has developed and taken a new shape with Heterosexuality. Produced by Hollow Comet, a member of the band Strange Ranger, the new collection is the first to confront Shamir’s queerness explicitly. On the cover, Shamir appears in the horns and hooves of an almost Luciferian creature, an androgynous Baphomet, a “subhuman,” beautiful terror. Instead of a pure gender confirmation, 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 polymathic antihero of the indie underground.
