Shamir braves industrial beats—and his trauma—on the remarkable Heterosexuality

The title of Shamir’s eighth album might be steeped in irony, but everything else about the LP is completely in earnest. On Heterosexuality, the Philly-via-Vegas 26-year-old faces his trauma head-on and lambasts harmful societal structures—be they as obvious as capitalism or as unexpected as supposedly progressive alternatives to outdated notions.

Producer Hollow Comet (of Portland, Oregon rock band Strange Ranger) pairs Shamir’s most confrontational salvos with appropriately booming, industrial-indebted electronics, while the album’s inner-psyche explorations get a similarly fitting canvas—synth-heavy pop styles that, like their harsher counterparts, sound unlike anything Shamir has previously attempted. His sonic experiments and forthright lyricism recast the anxious, frenzied sounds of his late-2010s albums as stepping stones on a path toward a gradually jelling, beautifully messy sort of acceptance.

To a certain crowd, Shamir might still be best known for the sleek, much-hyped dance-pop sound of his 2014 and 2015 output. But he never really felt ownership over that sound, so he ditched his big-name indie label to mostly self-release six albums’ worth of dissonant, lo-fi rock music over three-and-a-half years. He hasn’t been shy to say that some of this music has stemmed from manic episodes, and on Heterosexuality, he inches closer to the best possible outcome of addressing his bipolar disorder: becoming okay with himself.

This version of self-acceptance manifests even while he tackles incendiary, somewhat galaxy-brain ideas: “I’m not cisgender, I’m not binary, trans!” he absolutely belts, atop fire-drenched synths and industrial percussive clatter on the chorus of “Cisgender.” (Seriously, he could shatter windows here, and the primal power of his vocal performance rivals the all-time greats.) “I don’t wanna be a girl / I don’t wanna be a man,” he continues, asking questions as uncommon as they are deeply insightful: When certain boxes don’t work for us, why do we just create other boxes? Are someone’s pronouns, gender, and identity really that important compared to their personality, interests, and the energy they bring to a room?

“You’re just stuck in the box that was made for me,” he sings on “Gay Agenda,” further exploring the central question of “Cisgender” via high-register vocals that pierce right through Hollow Comet’s battering-ram drum machines and digital noise. “And you’re mad I got out and I’m living free,” he continues, “Free your mind, come outside / Pledge allegiance to the gay agenda.” The grass, he says, is greener on the other side of all categorization—be yourself without yielding to any structures or mindsets, and true liberation will follow. Or maybe the latter won’t come without an uprising: “I’ll keep my foot on your neck and don’t you forget / Can’t trust the government to change shit,” he threatens, over an aggressive minefield of distorted kick drums and roaring synths, on the industrial-rap song “Abomination.” Or, as he puts it more bluntly shortly thereafter: “I ain’t Tracy Chapman, but revolution’s on its way.”

This all happens just in Heterosexuality’s first three tracks, which rank among Shamir’s best songs to date. The rest of Heterosexuality uses synths not as sandpaper to drag across the ears, but as a melodic invitation to join Shamir in his quest toward internal betterment. “I couldn’t wait till I’d be killed / The leaking fault I could not feel,” he reflects on “Caught Up” amid a rush of ocean-blue synths and percussive flickering, and with the celebratory music, he transmutes that self-hate into something like self-love. “Although I’m winning, I still feel down,” he starts as the chorus kicks in, and as rapid, exuberant guitars take flight, he completes the thought: “On my luck!” It’s a joyous acceptance that tough times are part of life, and it’s irresistibly catchy. “I’m married to me! Me and myself in matrimony!” he squeals in delight on “Marriage,” which rolls in on new jack swing-esque percussion and a funky, glistening guitar line. He’s singing about the kind of self-worth that takes literal decades to reach, and his elation shows that the destination has been fully worth the journey.

“When my head is clear, the past inches near / Along with everything I wanna leave behind,” he sings on the chorus of “Cold Brew,” even more neatly distilling how tough but rewarding it can be to ditch your emotional scars for good. But the minor-key, mid-tempo guitars and synths imperfectly mesh with Shamir’s sky-reaching yet grounded delivery, hamming up a sharp rendering of trauma’s insidious nature. “Nuclear” likewise veers a bit too close to corny; on an album that starts so powerfully abrasive, it’s a tropicalia-inflected, Rhodes-assisted song that opens with the clunker, “You can nuke my heart like a microwave / It might be warm, but it can’t be made back to its original state.”

Still, when Shamir later sings, “Then someone comes around you simply can’t ignore / And so the cycle begins,” the metaphor—and music—becomes better: Now that he’s growing to love himself, he can finally start loving other people anew, too. It’s been a long time coming, but Heterosexuality is an engaging way for it to arrive.