[Cover photo credit to Shawn Poynter]
Singer-songwriter Adeem the Artist has announced their new album, Christians for Goliath, arriving December 11th, 2026, via Four Quarters Records / Thirty Tigers. Produced by John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, the 11-song collection draws from contemporary Christian music, Gospel, Country, Blues and Folk as Adeem “revisits a lifetime spent orbiting faith, apostasy, suffering and the possibility of meaning.”
Adeem has released a first preview of the album with “Hard to Get,” a collaboration with The Mountain Goats, released alongside an official lyric video. The song honors Rich Mullins, the Christian songwriter whose “radical generosity, unvarnished writing and unfinished final album” shaped Adeem’s earliest understanding of what a record could be.
For Adeem, Mullins “modeled a faith that was restless, searching, and grounded in service rather than certainty.”
Adeem has spent much of their life deciding what can still be called a prayer. Adeem grew up in a fundamentalist Christian family, writing their first songs about “God and heartbreak” and inviting kids from school to their parents’ Friday-night Bible study.
Years later, after leaving the church, working as an Episcopal chaplain, drifting into agnosticism, and putting their Bible in a box in the attic, prayer remained for them. It “changed shape, shed some of its certainties and followed them into songs.”
That conversation lies at the heart of Christians for Goliath. Across the album, Adeem “wrestles with belief as both a source of harm and a language for imagining a kinder world.” The record begins with the title track stripped to its acoustic bones and returns to it in full at the end, “completing a circle without pretending to resolve everything inside it.”
The title song arrived after Adeem watched Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde ask President Donald Trump to show mercy toward frightened immigrants and LGBTQ+ children during the National Prayer Service, following his 2025 inauguration. Trump later publicly attacked her, while pastors and commentators began arguing that empathy itself had become a sin.
To Adeem, the scene exposed an inversion as clear as the story of David and Goliath: Christians lining up behind the giant.
Adeem says:
There is this massive wave of evangelical Christianity in America that is largely rejecting the basic tenets of what Christian values are supposed to be. When it’s being done in the name of a God who calls for equity, justice, and radical hospitality, that is the wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Adeem sent the title song that he had been working on to Darnielle, who had become a friend after taking them on tour with The Mountain Goats. Adeem jokes that they had been “clawing for his approval with the same desperation they once reserved for their father.” This time, Darnielle told them they had hit the mark.
Darnielle proposed making a contemporary Christian record in Nashville, an idea Adeem immediately understood as “funny, uncomfortable and unexpectedly right.”
