Shamir Ends His Musical Journey the Same Way He Started It — On His Own Terms

When Shamir first broke into music in 2015, the artist made a deal with himself: “Once I feel like I’ve done and said everything that I felt like I wanted to do and say, then I will call it,” he recalls. “I didn’t want to be an artist who was doing this just because it’s their job.”

One decade and 10 studio albums later, Shamir is making good on that promise. Ten, the mercurial multi-hyphenate’s excellent, indie rock-infused new album (out now via Kill Rock Stars) is his last one, too. Over the course of 10 songs, Shamir tackles big and small questions — the existential struggle with aging on album-closer “29” feels right at home with the simpler understanding of love lost on “I Know We Can’t Be Friends” — before closing out this chapter of his professional life.

As he tells it, the decision to walk away from music was easy, at least in part because he had already experienced the closest thing he’s had to a break between his projects. Since putting out Ratchet in 2015, Shamir has released new albums at almost a yearly pace, occasionally dropping two full LPs in a single calendar year. But after the release of his 2023 project Homo Anxietatem, the singer says he found himself in need of some time off.

“I was producing with a friend, and we were just, like, throwing the ideas around. And all of a sudden I realized I didn’t have any plans to make an album. I didn’t even really have, like, songs or anything,” he says. “But I was like, ‘I want to work with you just because we’re friends.’ That didn’t end up working out with that person, but the idea of working with friends really stuck with me.”

It was a different mode of operation for Shamir. Since getting dropped by XL Recordings over creative differences shortly after the release of Ratchet, he’s largely self-written and self-released his own projects, occasionally teaming up with other indie labels to help bring his LPs to life.

That changed when the artist found a new home at Kill Rock Stars. Since signing with the label in 2023, prior to the release of Homo Anxietatem, Shamir says he no longer felt burdened by the expectations of doing everything himself. “To have that space and have that backing from the label gave me a little bit more clarity,” he explains. “Ending this chapter of my career felt like it came from a place of peace instead of frustration, which I love.”

Where other artists might use a final album to say all the things they’ve ever wanted to say in their music, Shamir didn’t have to do the same — he’d already shared his deepest thoughts through albums like Heterosexuality and Hope. Instead, he decided to draw his conclusions about working with friends to their eventual conclusion.

Every song on Ten, for the first time in Shamir’s career, are entirely written and produced by others. Whether he was asking his closests friends to let him sing a song they wrote or combing through those same friends’ unreleased demos to find songs he could perform, Shamir ended up with 10 tracks, written by and for others, now being interpreted through his own distinct artistic lens.

“I have so many incredible friends who aren’t necessarily songwriters by trade, yet are just incredible songwriters,” he explains. “I didn’t want them to write ‘a Shamir song,’ you know what I mean? I wanted demos and vault tracks tracks, and to metabolize those and bring them into my world and make them my own.”

A key example of the selection process, Shamir says, is the album’s opening track “I Love My Friends.” Back in 2021, Shamir received an email from his close friend Andrew Harmon, with the song’s title as a subject line and nothing but an MP3 in the body. Enclosed was the song, written by Harmon exclusively as a dedicated thank you to his close-knit circle for helping him deal with the death of his father.

“I remember listening to it, and by the end I was just in tears,” Shamir says of the song. “A dedication like that, unprompted and as a thank you — as opposed to just sending a thank you card or something like that — was just so beautiful to me.”

Another standout from the album, the heartbreaking “I Don’t Know What You Want From Me,” was written by Torres, who Shamir “wasn’t even particularly close with.” But when he presented them with the idea backstage at a music festival, they immediately said they wanted to send him a track. “[Torres] was literally on tour, and still sent me three demos,” he says. “That one was definitely the most shocking, just in terms of their enthusiasm for the idea.”

It’s for that reason that Ten plays out as a love letter rather than a farewell, where Shamir thanks the people who buoyed him in a turbulent career for a decade. It’s also why Shamir decided to release the album on May 19 — the one year anniversary of his debut album Ratchet.

“It was just like an extra kind kismet thing that I was able to add on to the triple entendre of it all,” he says. “It’s so rare when that happens, so when it does happen, it just feels so much like confirmation.”

As it turns out, having said everything he wanted to say in his career is just one of the reasons Shamir made the decision to call it quits after Ten. Part of the reason he relied so much on the support of his friends was simply because the music industry is a hard place to thrive, especially as a Black queer artist wanting to do something different.

Shamir qualifies that with the simple fact that “we made a lot of strides with queer people in pop music.” But after a certain point, the singer saw a pattern emerge, and it was one that he had no interest in adding to. “As a Black queer person, it’s not only hard to assimilate, but we are rewarded when we assimilate. We have to play the game to for survival,” he says. “In a lot of ways, I have suffered because I refuse to assimilate — but it was worth it for me.”

Sure, there are drawbacks that came with that: “I was not able to reach a certain level of mainstream success,” Shamir relents. But broad recognition isn’t the metric by which he chooses to measure himself. “Whenever anyone looks back on my career in five, 10, 15, 20 years from now, they’re going to be like, ‘Oh, but he never compromised,’” he says. “And I never will.” 

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