Shamir: “It’s crazy to think that I’ve only really made this music for a little over a year”

In the new issue of DIY (out Friday 24th April), Las Vegas phenomenon Shamir says he grew up shunning disco, before embracing the stuff for his debut LP ‘Ratchet’.

“There aren’t really musical scenes out here,” he explains to DIY’s Tom Connick, from the sofa of his Nevada home. “When I grew up listening to music, and started becoming a music-head, I was just listening to a bunch of music that wouldn’t be around me otherwise, because no one else was really listening to music outside of the radio. Being genreless has always been something that was instilled in me, because scenes pretty much don’t exist where I’m from. I never think about ‘who’ listens to it, I’m just like, ‘oh, I like this song! And I listen to it!’”

“I wanted something different for everyone,” he explains. “I wanted people to leave the album saying ‘I at least liked one song’ and ‘I at least vibed with one song’. I’m very proud of that – I felt that even though the album is very eclectic and has a bunch of different sounds, it still has a very cohesive aesthetic and it’s not too jarring of a sound.”

“Each song starts off different,” says Shamir of the collaborative process. “I might write on guitar and I’d send him a demo and he’d write around that, or a quick little drum machine demo and he’ll work around that. Or he’ll send me demos that he’s done, and I’ll write around that. For the most part, the lyrics are me, and the little ad-libs and low voices and things, those are usually Nick. He usually just adds into his production, which is good, because when I write my lyrics I have to be completely alone. It’s good that he’s fine with the idea of bringing each other stuff – we come together and build around it, as opposed to building from scratch, because we both work really well in isolation.”