Balance, Bounce, and Bibliotecas: Aminé is Glowing on His 3rd Sneaker Collab

I really had to look in the mirror and ask myself this question ahead of writing a story on Aminé and his latest collaboration with New Balance, the ABZORB 2000 Bibliotecas. Because damn, he’s doing everything—and he’s out here reading books on top of it all?? New album, new tour, hosting a huge music festival in his hometown, and dropping… dare I say it… a Sneaker of the Year nominee, all while staying on top of self care and bettering himself. Nah, Aminé gotta be AI.

Portland artist Adam Aminé Daniel didn’t just wake up in 2025 absolutely crushing life, though. He’s gone from Soundcloud to superstardom, consistently evolving over the last decade to become one of the most exciting artists in the game. Three studio albums and three sneaker collaborations deep, Aminé is executing on a creative level that you gotta see/hear/wear/read to believe.

Today, we’re going to focus on footwear, though. Aminé's latest installment for Boston-based New Balance is arguably his greatest sneaker yet, and one of the most highly anticipated runners of the year. Using the critically-acclaimed newcomer ABZORB 2000 as his canvas, Aminé delivers an epic story-driven shoe that turns as many heads as it does pages. The mesh and patent leather Bibliotecas look just like your normal New Balance sneaker, if your normal New Balance sneaker got sole-swapped with a spaceship and then subsequently slimed on Nickelodeon. A multitude of shades of green adorn the entire shoe, with small hits of light blue and yellow offering beautiful hits of contrast. Dog, THEY GLOW IN THE DARK. The colorway is inspired by… actually keep reading. I’ll let the artist tell you himself.

I caught up with Aminé as he hit the road for his Tour de Dance trip around the world. Normally, we’d cut these long conversations down and give you guys the cliffnotes but surprise surprise, Aminé is just as great at having a conversation as he is at everything else. So, count this long-ass interview as the first book on your reading list, go see Aminé on tour when he's in your city, and download the Sole Retriever app to cop your pair of Bibliotecas when they drop on October 3rd.

DREW LONDON, SOLE RETRIEVER: I know it's crazy with tour right now, so I'm gonna start there. You're on the road basically until Christmas. How do you prepare for that? Physically, mentally, spiritually, everything.

AMINÉ: Man, I'm really just trying to stay in a healthier mode on tour. I think my first couple of tours, I just had so much fun, not thinking about sleep. After a show, we'd drink and go have some fun in this new city. But now, I'm realizing I've got to get my rest, I have to take my vitamins. I have to make sure I'm eating healthy. You can easily get food poisoning in all these different places. I'm just watching everything I consume and making sure I'm right in the head mentally, just trying to take things as they are. There's a lot of problems that come up on tour, because it's like any job, just not letting issues dictate the rest of your day.

SR: How much different is touring now than when you started like a decade ago? Besides how you approach it, but from the industry side.

A: Just a bit. A lot has changed for me because of all the different career routes I've taken since I've started in music. When I'm on tour, I'm balancing out meetings on Zoom for my sneakers with New Balance and our rollout plan. I'm editing the commercial for the Biblioteca 2000s right now on tour. It's just balancing out a lot of shit, and I have a lot of people helping me put together my schedule. So it's like very on point, I'm not wasting even an hour on tour. I'm trying to make sure I have two hours to rest and one hour to do this call and 30 minutes to do this IG post to promote this thing. It's a lot, and I actually really care. I'm detailed about what I put out into the world, and I just can't just be lazy about it, you know?

SR: How many pairs of shoes did you pack for the whole tour? And how many do you pick up along the way?

A: I pick up a lot of clothes on the road. I'm a huge vintage seeker in all these random cities, because there's always a random vintage store in the middle of Utah on a day off that has a shirt I really love. Shoes-wise, it's pretty simple these days because I'm a couple of collabs in with New Balance, so I'm not rocking no other sneaker than my own. So it's just the Mooz, the BTs, the Bibliotecas and a couple samples of the Bibliotecas I've never shown that will premiere later on the tour, just different colorways that no one's ever seen, things like that. So, yeah, I didn't pack that many sneakers. Honestly, I've learned. On my last tour, I packed a whole suitcase of 20 sneakers, and I only rocked four of them. It's always a bitch to pack too many clothes and shoes on tour. I tried to keep it really light this time.

SR: How many shows do you think you'll get out of one pair of Bibliotecas?

A: I think I could do the whole US run on one pair of shoes, not to boast up my collabs with New Balance. But like, my favorite thing people say about my shoes when I send a pair to them, is they're like, “Bro, these shits never get dirty.” Because they're patent leather. People get New Balances, they're suede. I came into the game with New Balance, and the first design meeting I ever had, I was like, “I'm not doing suede.” I don't want to do suede because every collab is suede, and I want to do something that you never get to see on a New Balance, and that was patent leather. Not to toot our own horn bro, but you’re seeing more patent leather with a lot of collabs these days. That was our goal with it. One design rule is I love looking at shiny things, bro. And this is just such a kid-like quality of mine that isn't some huge design perspective that I went to school for. It's because I really like my shoes to be shiny. It just looks cooler to me.

[Editor’s Note: On IG, I'm pretty sure I saw Aminé take off his Bibliotecas and toss them into the crowd at the end of his 4th or 5th show on tour. So, at least two pairs used on this tour. We’ll see how the rest of the run shakes out for his stash.]

SR: Was your Best Day Ever Festival the first time you performed live wearing the Bibliotecas?

A: Great question. Yes, it was. That was the first time.

SR: How’d they feel? I saw some videos, it looked like you were having a lot of fun on stage.

A: They feel so good. The ABZORB 2000 has that crazy sole, and how thick it is with those bubbles (that glow in the dark!) give me the craziest bounce. I feel like a basketball player in them, because I really jump on stage. With my last two collabs, they were really good for stage performances, but this one, I really feel like I can jump higher in them. Maybe it's just a mental thing that I made up, but it really feels better performing in these.

SR: Been wearing them for a couple weeks and my biggest takeaway is the bounce, you get so much feedback in them, so much energy back in every step. What else did you love about this silhouette? I'm sure you're already working on your next one, so when you're deciding which silhouettes to work with, or digging back in the archives, do you weartest a possible candidate for a collab?

A: The next shoe is already fully done and has been designed for about a year now, so we've been working on that. We work on these collabs so far out, it's always so annoying to try to keep it under wraps for so long, you know what I mean? I've never had a leak, thank God.

SR: Listen, if you’re dying to let loose some info about the next one…

A: [Laughs] Yeah. But I’m about to have my next design meeting with them when I go to the Boston show. They’ll show me the plan and give me a lot of silhouettes to look at and dig into. Then, there's sometimes when I have a silhouette that I really love that I want to do, and I bring it to them and see if that's their focus. Because, you know, when it comes to big shoe brands like New Balance, they have their focus for 2027, 28, etc. and this year, their clear focus is the Minimus and the ABZORB 2000. I looked at the Minimus and I really loved it. But I knew sneakerheads wouldn't understand, and it was more like a fashion shoe. But when I look at my lineup of sneakers, I want to be able to showcase them as a great run of sneakers, you know what I mean?

So, I chose the ABZORB 2000 because it looked so good when I put them on with pants, and then I started to walk around in them and realized there's this natural feedback, as you said—I like that word, it explains it so well. I noticed that as soon as I put it on, and knew this was the sneaker I wanted to do. Anything I have ever created in my life, whether it's music or sneakers, I'm always going to be nervous about the way people are going to feel about it. You know, you never know. Something you love, the people might hate. It can always go either way. I'm just really hyped that people like this new silhouette because it's something really fresh and new for New Balance.

SR: Totally, it's definitely a risk. It looks very different from other things they do. I mean, it looks like a UFO. It feels like a classic New Balance on the top and then futuristic on the bottom. Marrying the two is really cool. I love that you spoke to the shine of your designs before. You never go traditional with your color palette. How do you decide on your colorways, and how many iterations did this one go through before you picked all the shades of green?

A: I always pick colorways based on a story I have. I have a Notes app in my phone with over 150 stories I've wanted to always tell within products like T-shirts or sneakers or a car collab, whatever the hell. When I go into my shoe collabs, I look at that note sheet and I'm like, what's going to be the most meaningful piece I could tell in the next step of my story? And I’d say like 80% of them are very specific to Portland, Oregon, because that's my home and that's one of the most unique places in the world to me. When I came into music, a lot of people thought I was from The Bay or Atlanta or LA or New York or something, so I always make sure people know I’m from Portland.

The story for the Bibliotecas 2000 is based on my library. The library card that I had since I was a kid was all green and had a little blue at the bottom. So on the bottom of the shoe, when you see that blue line, that isn't for no reason. That's to emulate the library card. I'm going to get into a little more detail for you with this answer. [Laughs] But the library card’s logo is a green M for Multnomah County Library, and the M has two peaks, like mountaintops, and the blue line underneath it is supposed to look like a river. Oregonian companies usually have trees and water in their designs because we have so many trees and water, you know what I mean? The bottom of the ABZORB 2000 has this slight curve and it really looks like a river. So I was like, yeah, we have to make it blue. It just tells that story even further for me. That's a detail I've never even gotten to tell people on social media or anything, but little things like that make me so proud when I look at the sneaker, because I wasn’t just trying to put a fucking colorway together to look cool. This is a real piece of my heart, in a product. I'd feel like a phony if I just had some cool colorway that everybody loved and I had no meaning for it.

SR: Yeah, I’m sure it means so much to the people from Portland, too. Like, how relatable is that to all of the people who have that library card? I need to google it so I can see what it looks like.

A: My actual library card is the artwork for one of my songs called “Shimmy.”

SR: I definitely got got. I tried figuring out the reference for the colorway from the matcha video, like zooming in on the green book you were holding. Doesn’t exist. [Laughs]

A: [Laughs] Not real. We made that book up bro, something that performative readers would read.

SR: Yeah, as I’m typing “Greatest Women of All Time by Bradley White” into my search, I’m realizing, this isn’t real. Just coming to grips with the fact that I’m doing the most Bradley White thing ever in real-time.

A: So funny dude, that makes me so happy that you actually tried to find it.

SR: C’mon, you know I do my research! But I love all of the storytelling around this shoe, from the teaser ad to the book drive campaign to all of the packaging. So good, and really shines a light on the importance of reading. How important is it for the next generation to put down their screens a little bit and read something, maybe spend some time at their local library?

A: I think it's really important. I'm putting it out because I have to challenge myself to read more, too. In the past two or three years, I've just been trying to read books that help me understand life as it is, and the spiritual books have helped me understand. My therapist recommended some to me that have helped with my happiness and feeling confidence for myself, things like that. Screen time is just absolutely killing our brains and frying us. We all need more reading.

SR: …and music! I'm guessing the design process of the Bibliotecas kind of lined up with the recording process of 13 Months of Sunshine. Was that your soundtrack while you were designing these?

A: In a way, yeah. I was working on this album for like three years. I could look back in my photos, but our first design meeting where I was working on this shoe with Jordan at New Balance was like a year-and-a-half, two years ago, almost. So I was like, rigorously working on the album and rigorously working on the shoe at the same time. Coming home from the studio and then the next morning would have a shipment of the first sample of the sneaker, get on a call, review it, then go to the studio and record, then come back and do my notes for the sneaker, etc. I'm always very annoying with notes for the sneakers. I think attention to detail is so important. I don't care how the shoe looks on someone's foot as much as how it looks when they put it in their hand and see all these little details they find like two months later, because they never looked at the bottom of the sneaker, or the tongue or the little logo on the back. All those little finds feel like a Where's Waldo moment for me that is so fun.

SR: The details are so good. The lace pull is almost like a ski boot or something, I love it.

A: My main reason for that is because every time I get sneakers these days, they come with four or five laces. I have too many fucking laces at my house, and I'm tired of them. No one needs this many laces in their life. Plus, people sometimes choose the worst color laces. Now every fit pic of people wearing your shoes looks trash because they got the orange laces on the green shoe, or whatever the fuck it is. That's just a taste thing for me. I put that lace lock on there so motherfuckers can’t change the laces.

SR: About uncovering details. I did a whole unboxing video and showed every part of the sneakers, and then later that night, I was putting them back in the box and pulling all the tissue paper out when I noticed the pile of books at the bottom!

A: See, that moment you just talked about is like my whole reason for having 50 design calls and 50 notes I put together over the course of months, because it's so nice to hear stories like that. For me, that's what makes doing sneakers worth it, because of little details like that.

SR: This comes across in your art and in your design and in your music, that you’re someone who goes the extra mile. There's not a lot of people going that extra mile. I can't tell you how many of these boxes piled up in my office look the same to the point where, when I'm actually looking for a pair of shoes, I can't find them. To see this box yours came in, the whole package, it's really just an experience. I'm excited for people to get their hands on these. There's a story, and it's people over product.

A: I love that you said ‘people over product’ because as a person who releases music people have to pay for a streaming service and releases shoes that people have to spend their hard earned money to buy... it can get very depressing to be the reason for capitalism. Always selling things feels kind of shitty being the one selling it sometimes. Just morally speaking, it’s so much more worth it when you can tell a meaningful story with it, give it a reason for being. I make money from music, man. I don't need to make sneakers to make a living. I do this out of pure love, and we stress the hell out, but the end result of people getting to hold that piece of art and getting an experience out of it, that is the part that makes it so worth it for me. When my account hits from the shoe selling out or whatever the fuck, I just look at that as business as usual, and it doesn't really make me feel anything inside my heart at all. But it’s so special when I see a kid at our Portland festival wearing a shirt he airbrushed that says NEED BIBLIOTECAS and he painted the green shoe, just that effort and their excitement over it, brings me a joy that is so unexplainable.

SR: You talk about the streaming services and the experience of the physical product. As I'm sitting on the floor of my office, opening up this box of shoes, it brought me back to being a kid and opening up a new CD, that whole experience. People are missing that physical product in music and being able to touch and feel something and read through the booklet and you're giving them that experience with these shoes, it's really valuable.

A: I was that kid, too! When I got the Speakerboxxx/The Love Below album, I cut out photos of Andre 3000 from that booklet and put it up on my wall. I did that with shoes, too. There's an experience with sneakers and albums and booklets and things that bring an excitement in my soul that no form of success could ever give me. You know what? That experience and appreciation for art is what every kid who grew up on the internet or just loved music or loved sneakers and loved fashion lived for, you know? Yeah, man, I'm happy you said that.

SR: We went off in another direction but when we were talking about your latest album, I wanted to ask one more thing about it. As I’ve been listening to 13 Months of Sunshine and wearing these shoes, there's a three-song run on the album, “13MOS,” “Changer,” and “Arc de Triomphe” that I kept going back to because they really sound like how the shoes make me feel, that bounce. Now that you've performed these songs in these shoes, do you feel that way too? Or which songs do you feel really encapsulate how the Bibliotecas feel?

A: I mean, that's a great question. Um, when you were saying it, I fully thought of “Changer” too because the drums just feel like you're tip-toeing in these sneakers to that beat. Yeah, yeah. I feel like it is “Changer” to be honest with you, that's a great call.

SR: You've evolved a lot musically, stylistically, and in your design language over your career, and you probably can't tell me much about this next shoe. But your next era in music, in art, in design, what does that feel like? What story do you want to tell next?

A: I don't know honestly, because I never want to give it bad luck or whatever. After the BTs with New Balance, I didn't know I was going to get to do the ABZORB just yet. You know what I mean? I’m always trying to figure out what story is meaningful to tell next. It's pretty dependent on me figuring out what resonates with me and my friends and the way my heart feels in the current moment. When I'm done with this tour, I'm gonna go back home and have a lot of time to think, and that's when I cook up. I just try to live my life as a regular ass person, go to my favorite coffee shop, go on a hike, go on a weekend trip to Joshua Tree, and just do regular things that make me feel like I can think about what I want to do next. I don't want to take any of this for granted and make the wrong decision, because we're just on a roll, you know?

SR: What do you feel like you have left to accomplish, anything left on the bucket list? Even specifically in sneakers, do you have a sketch in your notepad of a dream silhouette for your own signature sneaker one day?

A: Yeah, I feel like getting your own silhouette is crazy. You know what? I mean, the only people who get those, most of the time, are athletes and someone like my friend Salehe. But yeah, for me, I don't know what it would look like. I do know that we would go ham. [Laughs] We'd go so hard and do 55,000 revisions of it because now there's 3D printers. So any crazy idea you have, you could really hold it in your hand to see what it looks like. It's hard because I personally would never want to do my own silhouette if I wasn't sure of an idea that we had to execute. I don't think the world needs a new silhouette if it isn't actually good. Different from the rest.

Drew London

Drew oversees content at Sole Retriever and hates writing in the 3rd person soooo I'm going to stop. I've written for countless blogs and magazines, from Complex to XXL and everywhere in between. Spent a long time in LA, running content and working on branded collabs at The Hundreds. Now, I'm back home on the East Coast freezing my ass off. Email me at drew@soleretriever.com with scoops, story ideas, and size 13 heat.