ALBUM REVIEW: On ‘Anniversary,’ Adeem the Artist Draws From Their Beautiful, Impossible American Life

Rockers. Love ballads. Tragedies and picket songs. They’re all here on Adeem the Artist’s Anniversary. Recorded over five days with Butch Walker and a slate of Nashville’s finest, Anniversary is Adeem’s follow-up to 2022’s White Trash Revelry (ND story), which landed them a nomination for Best Emerging Act at last year’s Americana Music Awards and an appearance at the Grand Ole Opry.

Adeem the Artist (photo by Holly Rainey)

Descending first into a crash of cymbals, Anniversary begins with “There We Are,” a gunfighter ballad that just happens to be about love. The tune takes us through the scenes of a life shared, from the banks of the Tennessee River and right back to their dad’s old Pontiac where it started. These verses could be photographs, could be memories.

Walker’s trademark production touches (strong kick drums, arena-ready choruses) can be felt most on songs like “Nancy” and the queer country ballad “One Night Stand.” On “Nancy,” Adeem sings, “She’s got a vitamin case of vitamin-shaped capsules Theresa gave her but she shares with me” over a dangerous combination of piano and pop music snare. Just hang on for the hook. And in another world, Natalie Maines would already be giving “One Night Stand” her best, preferably somewhere on a stage at the state fair with Martie and Emily beside her. If you fell in love with country radio in the late ’90s, here you are.

All of “Plot of Land” and the verses of “Wounded Astronaut” knowingly borrow from John Prine, but Adeem makes the forms their own, reckoning with relationships gone by and the absurdity of trying to build an existence at $15 an hour. “Socialite Blues” packs in all the Bourbon Street horns that could be conjured out of Walker’s Nashville studio, The Butcher Shop. “You’ve been interfacing with an awful lot of people this week,” Adeem assures their spouse, “I’m sure your battery’s low.” Don’t worry: They wind up staying home.

 On “Part & Parcel,” they look at all the interweaving timelines and crooked pieces of time that eventually shaped into the form of their life, from cruise ship singer to a lost kid at the flea market. “A coward called courageous by virtue of my trade,” they sing toward the end, and you can feel it. With “Rotations,” Adeem is able to turn the seemingly simple question of “How many rotations am I gonna get with you?” into one of the more powerful lamentations on parenthood made in the modern country music genre.

Adeem the Artist (photo by Hannah Bingham)

Twice Adeem reclaims the pop country form for necessary protest anthems. On “Nightmare,” they flip the naive “Don’t Tread on Me” ideology on its head. Fellow recovering religious kid Katie Pruitt lends her voice to the chorus. Final line: “Please, Lord, release us / We’ve surveyed your rugged cross / Don’t do us like Jesus.” “Night Sweats” simmers in the experience of watching the Iraq invasion on TV and the trauma of trying to recognize their part in all of it.

On the final track, “White Mule, Black Man,” Adeem recounts the murder of two Black men in Knoxville a century apart. The tragedy is that the story’s familiar. The magic is in Adeem’s ability to trace a historical haunting into contemporary reality with just an acoustic guitar.

Throughout, the album contemplates existence, both public and private, and how the world intersects with our dreams and desires. Theirs is a folk music that uses its framework for self-reflection, empathy, and yes, even humor. Who said a country album couldn’t do all that?

Happy Anniversary.

Anniversary is out May 3 via Four Quarters Records and Thirty Tigers.