The dirty secret of making art is that it’s often incredibly dull. For as thrilling as the final product can be, the actual working process usually consists of the creatives in question hammering away at a take in isolation until they end up with something satisfactory. That was the case for Compton rap duo Paris Texas crafting their standout LP Mid Air, an album filled with such raucous highs you’d imagine the studio sessions were glorious chaos.
“You talk about making songs, sometimes you want really cool stories. You want it to be this adventure. Then you get to somebody’s studio, it’s really boring,” Louie Pastel admits. “It’s not like there was 20 bitches in the room [when] I was working on ‘Airborne’, and then my cock exploded.”
When I met Paris Texas, it was the night before their packed show in Brooklyn. At a cosy Bushwick coffee shop, Louie and Felix fit right in, looking like the myriad of slightly left-of-centre artistic kids drinking iced matchas and pecking away at their laptops. (Another patron offers to get us involved in their arts-and-crafts club, though the guys politely demure). But Paris Texas is far from ordinary, having won fans in Tyler, the Creator, Kenny Beats and Vince Staples, cementing themselves as vanguards of the Pollen playlist, a new favourite of your cool friend who somehow hears every artist two years before they make it big.
It’s easy, and understandable, to put Paris Texas in the ever-expanding crop of post-Brockhampton alternative hip hop acts: the cool kids whose appeal rests on how uncool they claim to be. But Louie and Felix have gracefully sidestepped expectations in their career together. Look no further than their July interview with The FADER, in which the pair revealed that not only is their name not drawn from the beloved Wim Wenders film, but Felix never saw it, and Louie is far from a fan. (“There’s certain white movies that are cool when they go through their weird little existential shit. That one’s not one of them,” he said).
The best songs by Paris Texas make you feel like you’re at an underground Soundcloud rap show in the late 2010s and in a 90s Minor Threat mosh pit, simultaneously. In the last half-decade, the intertwining of rap and rock has become a common refrain, but one that Louie and Felix approach with scepticism. “You’ll get an interview, like, ‘What’d you listen to?’ [and they say] ‘Paramore and Panic! at the Disco.’ No shit. Everybody heard that. It was pop music, dickhead,” Louie said.
Despite the heaviness of some of their subject matter – Louie’s hook on “Closed Caption” sees him apologising to his unborn child for passing down problematic genes, and Felix explores systemic oppression on “Bullet Man” – there’s clearly a Gen Z trollishness and caustic humour to the guys in Paris Texas. This ranges from dark, witty one-liners (“There’s people tryna kill me… other than me,” Felix sings on “Everybody’s Safe Until”) to their DJ crafting a cringey drop from Alicia Keys’ “Empire State of Mind” and hammering it nonstop at their New York show. Mid Air even features a track titled “Lana Del Rey,” a reference to the star’s own 2023 track “Paris Texas.” Despite some occasionally outlandish brags in their bars, Paris Texas is humble when talking about their rise, acknowledging the fickleness and frustrating nature of the music industry with an analogy about… punching a wall over and over again.
“It’s like 20,000 people punching up the same wall,” Louie explains. “One pierces through and you’re like, ‘How’d he do that?’ It’s some skinny kid and you’re like, ‘Dude, I was lifting 30 pounds of my own weight.’ I can’t push the wall. I don’t know. You never know. You can’t.”
Louie handles the brunt of production. As a budding multi-instrumentalist playing bass and guitar, he adds depth and grit to the group’s sound beyond consistently excellent drum programming. Felix is the primary MC. Though they share vocal duties, Felix raps Paris Texas’ meatiest verses, including a stellar performance on Mid Air’s “Sean-Jared,” which jams a Paris is Burning reference, crude sex bars and some particularly chest-thumping boasts on his rap bona fides. In our interview, Felix is warm and engaged but soft-spoken, rarely offering answers unless I directly prompted him. Despite their easy affability, Paris Texas is willing to voice some of the frustrations that come with being boundary-pushers in an era where genre-blending has become the norm.
“The only thing that irks me a little bit is that because we get put in alternative or rap rock categories, the lens in which people look at us is kind of fucked up,” Louie says. “So, it becomes this thing where only the super pretentious are like, ‘Is this even genre-bending? He just said ‘Cum in the sock.’ This isn’t experimental. Where’s the goddamn garage trash can clapping in the background?’”
Paris Texas’ October 19th London show isn’t a homecoming of course, but it does represent a return to a location that has become significant in the group’s story. The duo’s immersion into U.K. culture is directly responsible for Mid Air’s strangest and silliest song: “Full English.” It’s like a late 80s novelty rap song about meeting a girl from across the pond – an unlikely answer to Estelle’s “American Boy” – but with a churning beat and feature from fellow rising star Teezo Touchdown. Louie and Felix spend the song reeling off references including King Krule, Big Ben, the movie In Bruges, Tesco and Harry Potter. In fact, nearly every lyric ends in the phrase “with my London bitch.” If that sounds like the kind of thing that would get old fast, Paris Texas sell the concept with a hard-to-pull-off combination of dry humour and mosh pit-igniting excitement. “It was the last time we really had fun together,” Louie says of their trip to London in fall 2021. “We were meeting a lot of people. We were going out. I did Molly for the first time. That was cool.”
Felix cites British acts like Sam Wise, Jesse James Solomon, as well as their close friend Bakar as particular favourites. They explain that their musical tastes are largely synergistic and rather eclectic – a playlist of influences shared for their NME cover story included riot grrl pioneers Sleater-Kinney, oddball Atlanta rapper SahBabii and the short-lived yet oft-sampled 70s soul group Wee. But there are some clashes, and Louie explains that how they handle those differences of opinion are telling of their personalities.
“[Felix will] listen to shit where I literally walk in like, ‘You have to stop listening to this.’ He’ll be like, ‘No man, give people a chance, I really fuck with it. They’re growing, they’re learning. I really like this artist a lot. I’m like, ‘Bro, no,’” Louie admits. “He doesn’t do that to me, he lets me listen to what I want to. He’s not a hater.”
Moving into this next phase of their career, which includes a performance at Camp Flog Gnaw in November, in addition to shows in the U.K. and Australia, Paris Texas say they’re still understanding the depth of their popularity and how to square ambitions. They do seem to understand the secret to musical success though – make people wonder why you got so huge in the first place. “I think the best way to have impact is by people not understanding why you’re having impact,” he says. “Nobody to this day understands Drake.”
Though not big fans of the movie they share a name with, the members of Paris Texas are certainly cinephiles, a fact that comes across both in the music and in their extracurricular interests. Alongside the release of Mid Air, Louie and Felix released a corresponding short film in which they star as listless snack stand workers harbouring a desire to leave the atmosphere; they come into possession of alien drugs and sell them in hopes of reaching Mars. The multi-part short blends sci-fi surrealism and 90s indie cinema realism, recalling the work of Michel Gondry and Kevin Smith, while still feeling novel in its perspective. Louie writes many of the group’s music video treatments, and when asked about future on-camera ambitions, Paris Texas has little desire to score another artist’s vision.
“I would never do a soundtrack ever in my life, but for sure [make] a movie,” Louie says. (He recently watched the 90s Welsh cult film Human Trafficking, and said, “I was just jealous I couldn’t make it”).
Mid Air’s penultimate track, “Ain’t No High,” represents an intriguing growth point for the group, as they reflect on how their family dynamics have been affected by their unconventional career choices. The song also features some of Louie’s sharpest writing, rapping from his brother’s perspective in a smart subversion of perspectives. “My brother has a family of his own / They don’t see him like they see me / Never been disowned,” he raps, while Felix opens up about his sister’s struggles with schizophrenia. “It was a specific moment that happened when I was in middle school; she was in the hospital. I went with my dad to go see her. He said, ‘You got to see your sister.’” Felix recalls. “And then, for some reason, the next day she was a little more stable than she was before.”
As you might infer from the hook, “Ain’t No High” also touches on the dual-edged nature of pursuing artistic success, it’s at once intoxicating and unhealthy. On the precipice of a new level of fame, one likely to bring opportunities and obstacles in equal measure, Paris Texas is characteristically frank about what it means to pursue the kind of success they’re capable of.
“I’m doing self-harm in a way. If I’m going to keep chasing this thing and it’s going to end up hurting me later in the future, whether that’s physically or mentally,” Felix says. “It’s just I’m the only one that’s responsible.”
Credits
Photography Raphael Gaultier