If you drive north out of Las Vegas and keep going for an hour or so, the strip recedes to just that: a tiny swatch of buildings on the horizon. Today, halfway up a desert hillside, the sun is setting, dousing this whole stupidly beautiful view with golden-hour light. In the middle of this scene wanders 20-year-old Shamir Bailey – a post-gender, androgyne angel of a millennial – singing and strumming a guitar like some kind of Pied Piper to the puffing journalist and photographer behind him.  He is, without doubt, someone worth following. On The Regular, his irrepressible first single, feels like electrified sherbert for the ears. It’s one of those songs that lights up your brain and stays there. Candy-coloured and cowbell-clanging, it trips out a series of subversive rap-brags (“Guess I’m never-ending, you could call me pi”) that are dorkish and sweet and highly charming. These are qualities that are shared by Shamir himself. Some of Shamir’s songs are addressed to boys, some to girls. His high femme appeal has already made him into a queer hero of the internet. The way he describes it, though, makes it sound much more fun: “To those who keep asking, I have no gender, no sexuality and no fucks to give,” he tweeted, a declaration rounded off with a trio of emojis (raised hands, kissy face, OK sign).  Shamir grew up in the Sin City suburb of Northtown; unlike its glitzy neighbour, it’s not a place exactly famous for outré self-expression. He credits his nonconformism (“I’m the weirdest person here,” he laughs) and his self-assurance to his mum, an estate agent who had him at 18.  Shamir also says that “she called it”, “it” being the sudden gift of his pop career. He’d been making music since he pestered his mum for a guitar aged nine, but after high school he began losing faith in his ambitions. He planned instead on moving to Arkansas and being a farmer. “I just wanted to move to a small town,” he shrugs, laughing at how odd this plan sounds now.  But his mum urged him to take another year and see what happened. On a nothing-to-lose whim, he emailed a few demos to Nick Sylvester, head of the small Brooklyn-based label Godmode better known for its punk and noise acts. When he woke up the next morning, he found an email from Sylvester asking him to come to New York right away.  It was only his second time on a plane and he flew there “by myself to meet a stranger that I had only talked on the phone with once,” he remembers. “I was like: ‘What if he doesn’t show up? What if he murders me?’ But no, he ended up being Nick and he didn’t murder me.”  The pair recorded two tracks together. Shamir then went back to Vegas, “and pretty much just sat on my ass”. He was in his underwear, on the sofa, when he saw that Pitchfork had posted one of the songs, If It Wasn’t True, and named it as one of its Best New Tracks. “I was like: ‘WHAT. THE. FUCK?’”  An EP, Northtown, followed, and soon after Shamir signed with XL, home of FKA twigs, the xx and Adele. Now he’s about to release his debut album, Ratchet, which channels Larry Levan-era house and DFA-style beats beneath strikingly sincere and emotional lyrics. It should be a big deal, and that’s a prospect Shamir is still getting used to: we’re in the back seat of the car when he looks down at his phone and exclaims, “Oh my God!” and then, showing me, says, “I just got my first fan Twitter!” I take a picture of him holding up the screen, his face lit up with delight. “What shall I call my fans?” he wonders aloud. “Shaqueers?”  I have no gender, no sexuality and no fucks to give  Up until now, pop’s relationship with gender nonconformity has been more about performance than personhood: the “gender bending” spectacles of Bowie, Prince, Gaga et al. Shamir, however, has the innocence of someone who grew up in a new millennium when most people accept that same-sex marriage, for example, is a basic human right.  Not everyone, of course, shares his “whevs” attitude towards these things. “I always find it amazing that people get mad because they can’t figure out my gender,” he says. “Even though my only job here is to create art, I think being a genderless figure… it shakes people. And when that happens it makes me feel like I’m doing my job.”  So people ask him about his sexuality a lot?“Yeah!” he says, in a heavy, “DUH” tone. “Since adolescence. This is nothing new for me.”  You might assume that a sexually ambiguous teenager with a strikingly high voice would not have had the best time at high school. In Shamir’s case, you’d assume wrong. His classmates in Northtown voted him both “best dressed” and most likely to appear on the cover of Vogue. They also bestowed on him the highest high-school honour: a nomination for prom king. “Like, why wasn’t I bullied?” he says, with a sweet giggle. “I can’t explain it, I never could. Because it’s not like I was never talked about: I’d dress for school crazy, wearing dashikis and having my hair all kinds of ways. People would take pictures and laugh, but I guess they realised that it’s not a joke, that it’s me and I don’t care and I have friends who dug it.”  A religious upbringing also brought him clarity. Shamir was raised in the Nation of Islam and attended a youth group called Freedom of Islam, “but honestly, I’d sit there for half an hour being told the white man was the devil. And that’s when I recognised that, as an oppressed group, it’s one thing to come together and fight for your rights, but it’s another thing to isolate yourself.”  After a while he went to his mother and said: “So, the white man is the devil? What about my white friends?” He laughs at the ludicrousness of it. “We’re all the same, we’re all pink on the inside. So that’s when I really realised the goal is to come together and love and show acceptance. Like, why is there a gay ‘community’?” He counters himself quickly: “I mean, I understand the whole reasoning for it, to have these people together and to fight for equal rights, but now we should try to get outside of that, you know? We have to learn how to integrate.”  He adds: “I never felt like a boy or a girl, never felt I should wear this or dress like that. I think that’s where that confidence comes from, because I never felt I had to play a part in my life. I just always come as Shamir.”  In other words: this is him on the regular. And now you know.  Shamir’s debut album Ratchet is out on 18 May on XL. He tours the UK from today and plays The Great Escape, Brighton, on 14 May.
Shamir Bailey writes futuristic, candy-coloured love songs, refuses to be defined by gender and just wants to bring everyone together. Meet a thoroughly modern pop star