More about Paris Texas:
A picture of an object in midair doesn’t necessarily tell you whether it’s on the way up or down. There is no logic, no history, no narrative arc—just the present tense, the suspension of a single moment. So perhaps it was inevitable that Paris Texas, the wildly inventive duo from Los Angeles who blend various strains of rap and rock music into a fugue of pure energy and irresistible urgency, would name their full-length debut MID AIR. Whether filtered through songs like the serrated “ahead” or the pulsing, playful “trying to kill me,” this ethos—of commitment to whatever feels nakedly true in a given instant—makes members Louie Pastel and Felix unmissable voices in music today, essential translators of the end times.
While many young, aspiring musicians are constantly networking, straining to make connections and find potential collaborators, Felix and Louie came together gradually. A mutual friend had told each that the other made music, but it wasn’t until the pair discovered a shared interest in Robb Bank$—the underground rapper from Florida whose outré style and askance sense of humor have made him a cult figure illegible to many—that they understood they were on the same wavelength. “Robb was an entry point,” Felix says of that mutual recognition. “It’s like when you make a joke in a group of people and one other dude gets it: ‘Oh, you laughed at this? We’ve got the same sense of humor.’”
What would eventually make Paris Texas an unrelentingly fascinating duo is the ability to embody, and untangle, a handful of apparent contradictions. The first one they had to bridge was the tension that young people feel between the online and in-person experience of receiving and making music. Around the beginning of the 2010s, Louie, who handles the group’s production, had drifted away from hip-hop and toward post-hardcore, math rock, and technical metal. “Once the jerkin’ era happened, I stopped relating,” he says of the hyper-minimal, dance-based style of rap that dominated L.A. at the start of that decade. “I wasn’t in a party mode, wasn’t in a club mode.”
Two things nudged Louie back toward rap: witnessing, from afar, the explosion of Tyler, the Creator, and having a friend move into his home who urged him to rap along with 10 Haters, the album by Flash Bang Grenada, a duo comprising hyper-technical L.A. linchpins Busdriver and Nocando. As Louie was opening himself up to these new movements in hip-hop—one that made it onto Jimmy Fallon, one that would stay on the ground in East and South L.A.—Felix was immersed in the blog era, studying the Cool Kids, Mickey Factz, and early Kendrick Lamar. And yet the spark he found had nothing to do with zip files or RSS feeds. “Felix was the first person I ever heard who sounded like a rapper in person,” Louie says of the earliest verse he heard his future partner spit.
Another seeming incongruity Felix and Louie learned was between the desire to catalog their work and lives and the desire to be ephemeral. At first, the duo didn’t even record the songs they wrote and rehearsed together, and eventually played at gallery openings and other shows around the South Bay area. This was in part due to circumstance—a lack of recording equipment, and sometimes of cars to get to whatever studio sessions they could scrounge up—but also lent them an air of mystery, of exclusivity.
When it came time to name themselves, they took inspiration from a still image they came across on Tumblr of the 1984 Wim Wenders movie. Their idea, initially, was to perform as “Paris Texas (1984)” at one show, “Hollywood Florida 2001” at the next, and so on—always misplacing themselves on the map and in time, reflecting the experience of, as Louie puts it, “Black kids that didn’t feel like we belonged in a place.” It was at once a nod to the strange afterlife works of art can have, and a smokescreen into which they could disappear when necessary.
The final contradiction Paris Texas seems to revel in is between what’s instinctual and the product of deep forethought. When the group began to receive national attention with the eight-song Boy Anonymous, which dropped in May 2021, it was clear that both Felix and Louie had a wealth of technical knowledge: Felix’s tightly wound, epigrammatic verses and Louie’s bursts of what seems at first like pure id; Louie’s immediate but sophisticated production, which belies the premeditation he has on the mic, as well. The guys followed Boy Anonymous only six months later with Red Hand Akimbo, which served to further disorient and tantalize audiences who have come to expect that the group will deliver the unexpected.
Now, Paris Texas is ready to unleash everything that got them here—the impulse and the master plan, the groove and the cacophony. This is all crystallized in the video for lead single “PANIC!!!,” which depicts a raucous club night that turns bloody, the hard pivot to the morning after, and the new rhythm that emerges in the wake of it all. The clip is reflective of Louie and Felix’s longstanding commitment to the visual aspect of their work. See videos like “FORCE OF HABIT” or “girls like drugs,” where the duo weaves clever narrative threads through edits that are otherwise hallucinatory, overwhelming in the purest way, a rush of both nostalgia and invention. Or take the turn-of-the-century digital renderings in the video for “SITUATIONS,” which makes the viewer feel as if the internet of his or her youth has come back for revenge.
Above all, the duo is committed to saying something worthwhile, communicating ideas that stick. “You never want to waste someone’s time,” Felix says. When he and Louie write and record, there’s a simple, guiding question that dictates the move forward: “Is it worth listening to?” With MID AIR, the answer is a resounding yes.
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