As they began working on a new batch of songs, Adeem the Artist was busy thinking about the way a lifetime of experiences can pile up in a person’s brain. “Traumatic events and warm events leave psychological imprints — there’s this pattern to it,” says the Knoxville, Tennessee-based performer. “Different moments and different impressions throughout our lives will ripple out and demand repeated engagement. They play out in little holidays that we celebrate over and over.”

Those patterns and markers of time are a crucial thread running through Adeem’s new album Anniversary, due out May 3, 2024 via Thirty Tigers. Recorded live to tape over five days at The Butcher Shop (Nashville, TN) and produced by Butch Walker (Taylor Swift, Frank Turner) with the master musicianship of Megan Coleman (Jenny Lewis and Allison Russell), Nelson Williams (Jake Blount), Ellen Angelico (Wheeler Walker Jr.), Jessye DeSilva, Aaron Lee Tasjan, and Katie Pruitt, the 12-song collection is a stunning statement of empathy, humor, and deep introspection.

The groundwork for Anniversary began in earnest after Adeem met Walker for coffee, having caught the producer’s attention with some spirited shitposting on social media. Adeem had been a fan since Walker’s solo album Sycamore Meadows, which they heard while living in the Syracuse, New York, area after high school. “I was absolutely obsessed,” they say. “I was a Christian worship pastor and having all these doubts. The religious questioning and soul searching Butch was doing on that record was so important for me.”

Walker’s ability to blend sounds from classic to contemporary, commercial to experimental, gives Adeem license to play with a range of musical styles on Anniversary, while still remaining tethered to country and roots music. Fittingly, Anniversary also arrives on the date of Adeem’s marriage to their spouse Hannah, bringing with it a heightened sense of intimacy and urgency from a songwriter whose work is characterized by fearless, incisive lyric writing.

“This one feels a lot more personal and earnest — a lot of it is very close to the chest,” Adeem says. “This record is a marker as well as a collection of individual markers. I’m saying, ‘This is who I am as an artist and this is the world I want to try to help create.’”

The passionate activist side that has been a hallmark of Adeem’s work from the beginning is still very much present on Anniversary. In the heart-pounding anthem “Nightmare,” featuring Katie Pruitt, there’s a palpable sense of outrage and defiance over the wave of anti-trans legislation in this country. Adeem, who is non-binary and pansexual, flips the “don’t tread on me” sloganeering by right-wing types on its head by posing a hypothetical about their beliefs. “Suppose some senators decide your worship is obscene/All ages Sunday service is suddenly a felony,” they ask in one verse.  “I used that language to be like, ‘Can you see how you are, in a real and tangible way, actually doing the thing you’re so afraid of somebody doing to you?’” they say.

Delivering impossibly heavy and deep subject matter in an empathetic and humane way, that’s the beauty of Anniversary— Adeem always digs deeper to find the complicated truths that are contained within.

PRESS

Adeem the Artist refines their ability to tell country tales from where they stand – NPR

Adeem the Artist, Crafting a Country Music of Their Own – The New York Times

Adeem the Artist Announced with “White Trash Revelry” that it’s Their Country Too – PopMatters