![News Added Oct 26, 2017 You can sense from his album art alone that Shamir Bailey — who writes and performs melodic outsider pop under his first name — reveals and obfuscates himself in equally cautious measure. In the years since his neutral, warm smile graced the cover of 2014's Northtown EP, the 22-year-old Las […]](https://hasitleaked.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Shamir-Revelations-Album-Art-320x320.jpg "Shamir : Revelations")
You can sense from his album art alone that Shamir Bailey — who writes and performs melodic outsider pop under his first name — reveals and obfuscates himself in equally cautious measure. In the years since his neutral, warm smile graced the cover of 2014's Northtown EP, the 22-year-old Las Vegas native's depictions have been anything direct. On Shamir's debut LP, Ratchet, he was transformed into a neon line drawing; on the cover of his unannounced sophomore album, Hope, his hands covered his face in an expression of joy or grief (or perhaps both).
The cover of Revelations (out Nov. 3 on Father/Daughter Records) finds Shamir more distant than ever, featuring a downright creepy photo of the artist in which his eyes and mouth have been edited to blend seamlessly into his skin. The photo appears to allude to something Shamir has faced throughout his short career: attempts to silence his voice. He was dropped from XL Recordings after Ratchet's release; he then considered quitting music altogether and dealt with hospitalizations due to mental health struggles. He's also had to contend with the confounding social pressures and expectations placed on him as a queer black artist (not to mention the way his androgyny became the center of nearly all media attention on him).
And yet, Revelations feels like Shamir's most vulnerable and sure-footed work; its stripped-down, self-produced songs are brimming with self-assurance and confidence, even in the midst of anxiety and heartache. "We gotta learn to love ourselves," he sings on "Cloudy." On "Blooming," he announces: "I'm too strong to just lay down and die." And he confronts the forces that sought to silence him directly and indirectly on the album: "Games" explores frustration over the commercialization of art ("I don't have much to offer you / But my soul, my heart, and everything I've been through / But you just see the green"); "Straight Boy," Shamir explained to NPR Music, came out of frustrations with "whitewashing and queer baiting in media."
