Paris Texas: inside the year’s most inventive and unpredictable debut album

Paris Texas are just about ready to get off this planet. On ‘Mid Air’, the LA punk-rap duo’s thrill-packed debut album, they trade bars about escaping this doomed rock by saving up enough cash for a one way ticket to Mars. “The sun is whoopin’ everybody’s ass,” they lament. “Earth finally threw in the towel.”

On a blazingly hot afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, it isn’t hard to see how the pair arrived at that apocalyptic conclusion. The sun is indeed whoopin’ everybody’s ass today. In a warehouse studio booked out for their NME cover shoot, rapper-producer Louie Pastel has his shirt off and a weathered MTV cap pushed back on his head. He’s holding a cigarette in one hand and DJing from his phone with the other.

The sounds filling the room are as eclectic as you’d expect of a group that have drawn comparisons with Odd Future and Death Grips but who defy easy categorisation. We hear Louisiana rapper Autumn!, then Brazilian psychedelic samba from Novos Baianos and Radiohead’s acoustic version of ‘Creep’. Beside him, his comrade Felix is weighing up the pros and cons of filming vs photo shoots. “In videos you’re in constant movement, so you’re not stuck on one dumb face,” he ponders. “Models are crazy! I don’t know how they do it.”

In anticipation of ‘Mid Air’, Paris Texas recently put out a string of music videos themed around the idea of blasting off to Mars – some hosted by longtime friend Mac DeMarco. The absurd, acerbic clips showcase their boundless creativity, and a knack for storytelling that transcends music. In fact, growing up in Compton, Louie originally dreamed of becoming an actor, or a comic book artist. “I just liked creating stuff,” he explains, taking a seat on a couch. “Music wasn’t really at the forefront of what I wanted to do.”

In nearby South Central, Felix was stealing his older sister’s iPod so he could listen to early Drake mixtapes, Lil Wayne and Kanye. ‘The College Dropout’ was on repeated rotation. “For the majority of middle school I was listening to ‘Get Em High’ a lot,” he recalls. “At that time, I didn’t know I wanted to do music. I just liked it.”

The pair met while attending community college in 2013, bonding over a shared love of underground rapper Robb Bank$. By then, Louie was using Ableton on his laptop to make beats, playing them for anyone who’d listen. Friends encouraged him to take music, which he saw as a hobby, seriously. “My last semester there, I showed this kid Wes some beats and he was like: ‘You’re showing a lot of people beats, and I haven’t heard you talk about school one time!’” remembers Louie. “He was like: ‘You might just want to quit school and do music full time.’”

Felix, meanwhile, was busy scribbling down rhymes and tentatively recording using a home mic and a “shitty ass version of Pro Tools”. Nothing he’d want to play to anyone, though. “I wasn’t telling nobody,” he recalls. “I felt like I didn’t earn the title of someone who made music, because I wasn’t putting it out.”

In 2014, both Louie and Felix started playing small gigs at parties and art shows around LA, but still considered themselves separate artists. It was fate that pushed them to join forces. “We weren’t a group, but they’d always book us together,” explains Louie. They took the hint, and decided to help each other work on tunes. “That was the initial plan: Get good at whatever you want to do, feel more comfortable, and then we’d be like: ‘Do your own thing, I’ll do my own thing.’ But, we ended up just constantly making music together.”

What really bonded the pair was their shared unwillingness to put out anything they didn’t truly love. In 2018 they officially formed Paris Texas, taking their name from a Wim Wenders film, inspired by a still from the movie they spotted on Tumblr. They thought the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate places suited their broad-ranging sound. Released that same year, debut EP ‘I’ll Get My Revenge In Hell’ picked up some buzz, but instead of running towards the hype they disappeared, waiting until they felt they had something truly worth saying.

That came in 2021 with the release of the viral single ‘Heavy Metal’, followed by mixtape ‘Boy Anonymous’ and second EP ‘Red Hand Akimbo’. What once was a hobby had become their lives. “When you’re chasing something creative like music, that doesn’t conform, everybody – parents, girlfriends – deems you as lazy and thinks you don’t want to work hard,” says Louie. “Once I got started I was very much like: ‘Alright, let me work as hard as I possibly can.’”

In March 2022, Louie and Felix decamped to Mount Shasta, a quiet town at the northernmost edge of California, to focus on a full-length project away from the distractions of LA. Their recording sessions, however, were soon cut short by tragedy: Felix learned his father had died and rushed back to LA. His death lurks in the shadows of ‘Mid Air’, a record which couldn’t help but be influenced by their shock and grief. “It’s taken from real life,” says Felix. “The more we’ve gotten older, you realise that not everybody is going to make it. It’s something that you forget, because you’re used to them and you think they’re going to be there forever.”

There’s a reckoning with mortality woven through ‘Mid Air’, from the album’s ear-catching opening line (“Who wanna rock? Who wanna roll? Who wanna die?”) to the morbid rumble of album highlight ‘Everybody’s Safe Until…’ (“Death on my mind / I got death on my mind” goes the repeated refrain). No wonder Paris Texas are so keen to make their escape from Earth, or at least Los Angeles.

They seem almost more at home in London, which they visited for the first time during the ‘Boy Anonymous’ tour in 2021 and quickly fell in love with. They commemorate the trip on the tongue-in-cheek track ‘Full English’, which reels off a list of the best of British culture from Harry Potter to “rolling a cig”. “We went for like two weeks, and it was really fun. A lot of memories made there,” says Felix, before Louie adds: “London feels like somewhere I would like to move to in the near future. When I’m there I’m like: ‘This feels like home.’” King Krule also earns a name drop, as the pair are both fans. “I feel like that’s the one artist that really broke through here,” explains Louie. “He was our introduction to that world.”

The references to Britain (“I’m in a puffer coat made under a London flag”) continue on subsequent track ‘Lana Del Rey’, which is named as a nod to the fact the titular singer has her own song called ‘Paris, Texas’ on her most recent album. As Louie reveals, that idea was itself inspired by Washington mathcore band The Fall of Troy. “I grew up on them and really like them, and they did the same thing with Tom Waits,” he explains. “Tom Waits has a song called ‘The Fall Of Troy’, and The Fall of Troy has a song called ‘Tom Waits’. It’s an ode to them, more than it is to Lana Del Rey, which is funny. I thought it was a perfect opportunity.”

“Having to drop ridiculous amounts of music [to stay relevant] is a disservice to music itself” – Louie PASTEL

We’re speaking four days after the release of ‘Mid Air’, a moment Louie, who wrote all the music, played guitar, and drummed on the album, found particularly sweet. “It’s like a fucking weight off my shoulders!” he grins. “I can finally think freely. I feel complete bliss. People are loving it, which is cool.” Well, most people. Louie has been reading comments online. “Some people still shit on our writing ability, which is so stupid!” he complains.

“Weirdly enough, doing anything alternative gets you so much more criticism than doing anything else. I think the production is so crazy, and the ideas are so crazy, that people are like: ‘Why aren’t they rapping about quote-unquote real shit?’” He rails against the idea that every lyric should have to have a socially conscious message. “I don’t want to talk about Black problems all the time!” he says. “I’m trying to have fun! It’s a fun album, and we give you bits of that.”

He also pushes back on the notion that the only way to stay relevant in modern music is to constantly pump out new ‘content’. “The most popular artists right now, not all of them obviously, but a lot of the most popular artists right now are dropping ridiculous amounts of music, and to me that’s a disservice to music itself,” he says. “It’s the society we live in now where everyone’s trying to flip through things, and I feel like people get so bullied by society to fall into that.”

“Doing anything alternative gets you so much more criticism” – Louie

He has plenty of ideas about where Paris Texas might go from here – a collaboration-heavy mixtape, a deluxe version of ‘Mid Air’, a comic book – but he doesn’t feel the need to rush anything simply to feed the internet’s insatiable appetite for new stuff. “Everybody should be more patient with their art,” he says. “The next project might not come out for four years, truthfully. We’ve got to figure it out!”

For now, Paris Texas remain in ascendance. The surreal wit and explosive energy of ‘Mid Air’ might not get them to Mars, but they’re not ready to come back down to Earth yet either. “We’re floating!” says Felix, with a smile. “Enjoy the show! We’re gonna do some tricks in the sky before we land, you know what I’m saying?”

Paris Texas’ debut album ‘Mid Air’ is out now

Listen to Paris Texas’ exclusive playlist to accompany The Cover below on Spotify and here on Apple Music

Words: Kevin EG Perry
Photographer: Ashley Osborn
Mgmt: Mike Ahern

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