Shamir’s Final Solo Album Ten Out Today Via Kill Rock Stars

“I Love My Friends” Video Out Now

"Shamir’s falsetto is simultaneously piercing and doleful” - New York Times

"Unwavering skill at song-craft" - Billboard

“Always prolific” - SPIN

Monday, May 19 - Today, shapeshifting Philadelphia-via-Vegas artist Shamir has released his final solo album Ten via Kill Rock Stars, on the 10-year anniversary of his debut album Ratchet. The project is a love letter to friends who shaped Shamir’s life - 10 songs written by those closest to him, unused demos and castaways given a new life - from artists like Grant Pavol, Like St. Joan, Poolblood, and more featured in the video out today for “I Love My Friends.” Originally written by Andrew Harmon after the death of his father, Shamir revived the song with anthemic sincerity, celebrating steadfast friendships through grief, growth, and change.

Tonight, Rough Trade New York will host Shamir for an in-store performance and signing.

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Ten

“I Love My Friends”

The album, produced by Allen Tate of San Fermin, is built from live instrumentation, a departure from the digital pastiche of earlier Shamir records, more polished than some of Shamir’s lo-fi rock. Previous singles “Neverwannago” and “Recording 291” are joined by “I Know We Can’t Be Friends” (a post-breakup portrait written by Grant Pavol), “29”(musings on near-thirties existential exhaustion written by Sizzy Rocket), and more.

Ten finds Shamir in yet another mode: a conduit rather than a confessor, an interpreter rather than an architect. With his HBIC (Head Bunny in Charge) Leche on the cover, the communal and personal epilogue binds together disparate narratives with Shamir’s singular voice, ragged and divine.

Performing and collaborating with everyone from Le Tigre and Courtney Barnett to Troye Sivan, Rina Sawayama, and Mac DeMarco, Shamir’s career has been one of constant evolution - from the dancefloor irreverence of 2015’s Ratchet on XL Recordingsto the lo-fi catharsis of his self-titled 2020 album. Heterosexuality followed in 2022, a searingly confessional record that wove together industrial flourishes and razor-edged vulnerability.

Over the past decade, Shamir has navigated a music industry that has never quite known what to do with him — fluctuating success, industry indifference, and, at times, outright hostility. Ten is, in contrast, an exercise in love. It is a reclamation of music as a shared language, rather than a performance of self.

If there is any lingering question about whether this truly marks the end of Shamir as a solo entity, he leaves little room for ambiguity. “I’ve done and said all I wanted to say,” he states plainly. “I never want to feel like I’m forcing my art.” He has spent the last ten years running through the storm, and now, surveying the wreckage, he has chosen to walk away.

Ten is not the sound of an artist burning out. It is the sound of an artist setting himself free.

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For more information please contact Shore Fire Media:

Rebecca Shapiro (rshapiro@shorefire.com) 

Shannon Cosgrove (scosgrove@shorefire.com) 

Luci Paczkowski (lpaczkowski@shorefire.com)