Chameleon-esque singer, songwriter and guitarist Shamir is stompin’ sawdust with country barnburner “Other Side”—the fourth and final single just released from his upcoming self-titled album, due in stores October 2nd.
The 25-year old Philadelphia-based artist wrote “Other Side” after watching an episode of Unsolved Mysteries about a woman’s years-long unsuccessful search for her husband who went missing during the Vietnam War.
He delivers the sad story in a bossy country banger by shoveling grit onto his distinctively perched vocals and taking on her POV in his lyrics about how she never gave up the search for her love, (“It wasn't goodbye, couldn't get a goodbye / God knows I tried my best.”) According to Shamir, both lovers are deceased, so the song is also about how he hopes they’re together in the afterlife.
Surrounded by electric guitars, chugging drums, pedal steel and banjo, the dirt road swagger of “Other Side” (loosely inspired by Miranda Lambert’s “Ugly Lights” from 2016’s The Weight of These Wings) might surprise those who only know Shamir from the knob-twiddling house music and bright dance pop that catapulted his 2015 debut LP Ratchet onto year-end lists at Rolling Stone and NME.
Country music (among other genres like punk, shoegaze and alternative) is vital bedrock to Shamir’s genre-hopping artistic trajectory. Growing up in suburban North Las Vegas, he’d pull up Rhapsody and listen to country music on Sundays while the rest of his family played gospel music. A teenaged Taylor Swift was also an early influence.
And if you step back through his impressively varied catalog of albums, EPs and seven-inch singles, you’ll find he’s been low-key carving out a corner for himself in this predominantly white and cisgender genre of music for the past seven years.
You’ll hear it in the sentimental “The Things You Loved” from his 2018 album Resolution. His cover of Canadian country singer-songwriter Lindi Ortega’s “Lived and Died Alone” on his 2014 EP Northtown is a stunner. And then head back to the beginning for several country-tinged lo-fi pop tracks on Bedroom Songs—a 2013 EP he made with his friend Christina Thompson as part of their hometown duo called Anorexia.
“Other Side” is a proud outlier compared to the alternative and indie pop vibes that invite repeated spins of “Running,” “On My Own,” and “I Wonder”—the three previously released singles from Shamir’s forthcoming eponymous collection, which will be his seventh studio LP and second album release of 2020.
In a recent conversation with the Los Angeles Times, Shamir described this next release as his “coming of age” album, revealing, “This is the first record where I had confidence and everything was intentional. Everything came out truly as I envisioned it.”
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