Shamir ‘Til I Tell Ya - Hot Press Meets Shamir

Twenty-year-old Las Vegas native Shamir appears to have all the necessary attributes to make a big breakthrough in 2015. Possessed of a quirky charisma, his music is a distinctive blend of house, hip-hop and R&B, topped off with irresistible pop melodies. His falsetto vocals also have echoes of Michael Jackson and Prince, and were he to enjoy mainstream success, he would be one of the few male stars in a pop landscape dominated by the likes of Lana Del Rey, Lady Gaga and Lorde.

“People ask me this all the time, why there aren’t too many male pop stars,” notes Shamir, whose high-pitched speaking voice also recalls Michael Jackson. “By pop stars, I don’t mean Justin Bieber or One Direction or whoever. To me, they’re just guys who sing. But with Prince and Michael Jackson, not only did they sing but they had a sound, an aesthetic and a look – a whole world around their music. It’s not like oh, it’s just this really attractive guy who sings.”
Having released a well-received debut EP in 2014, Northtown, and followed it up with the cracking single ‘On The Regular’, Shamir recently completed work on his debut album, which is due for release around May. Perhaps understandably, his offbeat take on dance music has thus far enjoyed more success in Europe than the US, where audiences tend to like their artists to be a little more straightforward.
“They do, the sound America is vibing with is a more of a conventional electronic sound,” nods Shamir. “It’s not so much anything house-y, and also my music has a heavy hip-hop influence. Funnily enough, I wasn’t at all into dance culture growing up, and I wasn’t really into clubbing or anything. When I was a teenager, I associated dance with EDM, like Deadmaus, Skrillex and Diplo. Pretty much stuff that’s always played on the radio over here. Growing up I was mostly into guitar-based music like folk, country, rock and punk. Any electronic music I listened to was generally pop, like Robyn and Marina and the Diamonds.
“Then when I sent my first demo to Nick Sylvester, who produced my EP and my album, he was going, this has such a house vibe. I was like, what’s house music?! So he showed me early house like Frankie Knuckles and all that stuff. It was just something I found myself doing, it hadn’t been a conscious influence at all.”
Although the seedy allure of Las Vegas would appear to provide an ideal source of songwriting inspiration, Shamir grew up in the suburbs north of the city and says he had a fairly mundane upbringing.
“Vegas locals stay away from the Strip,” he says. “Just because it’s crowded and we don’t want to go with the tourists. If we do go down there it’s usually for a reason, like if it was someone’s birthday or there was a party in a hotel. Or maybe if you were going to see a concert, or you worked there. So it was usually one of those things. We wouldn’t go there just to chill or have fun. Usually downtown is where the locals go to have fun or dwell or whatever, but still, both places still have a fairly heavy 21 and over policy, which would have made things difficult for me as a teenager.
“Really, for me, it was the classic dynamic of music being an escape from suburban boredom. I would come home from school and play my guitar for hours and write songs – that was my fun time.”

Northtown is out now on God Mode