Kill Rock Stars US Vinyl & CDs

Review: It's hard to know where to begin with Shamir's second album. Or at least it was in 2017. The music? The context? Maybe both: the difficult follow up to one of that decade's finest pop records marked an about turn for the artist, and an almost vulnerable level of honesty, rejecting any preconceptions about his earlier effort and exploring a very different end of the emotional noise spectrum.
While last time round things had been incredibly polished and hook-driven, almost sing-along pop, on Hope we're taken to a rougher, rawer, perhaps grittier side of Shamir. Recorded in just one weekend, originally released for free, it's a grungy, lo-fi, punk-y, garage rock 'n' roll experiment that keeps on delivering across all 12 tracks. A brave change of course and one that we hope will continue.