![]() And then, our friend Kenny Beats, was like, ‘Yo, don’t run from the thing that got you on.’ So we just decided to embrace it more. “Sometimes, after the first record, we didn’t know whether to continue down this path of like, rock shit. “We just lean into what we know,” says Louie, who handles “85 percent” of Paris Texas’ production-and who, as a teenager, was a fan of post-hardcore. Aco’s Miracle Bullets,” Louie concedes, “Can’t tell if it’s rap, can’t tell if it’s rock, I walk in between.” On “PANIC!!!” he offers, “I came into this bitch with no genre… why the fuck would I stop… fuck you think tryna put me in a box?” Paris Texas are more than aware of the conversation. But rap and rock have dovetailed in different iterations for decades, but rarely this inventively. Really, they may fuel the simplistic question that’s dogged the duo since their breakout: Are they rap? Are they rock? Or are they-wait for it-“rap-rock”? I'm old enough to remember when that hyphenate was used to refer to a certain era of rather numbskulled music (with which the guys having nothing in common). MID AIR’s most hard-hitting electro bangers-including “tenTHIRTYseven,” “BULLET MAN,” and “Earth-2” have more in common with The Prodigy than traditional hip-hop. ![]() We’d laugh 'cause it was fucking horrifying! I remember being 14, seeing a beheading video, and showing my friends. ![]() So that’s something we figured out on this record: how to say more than we’ve ever done before.” With BOY ANONYMOUS, we like to put bits and pieces of our personalities in there, but with this one we got more into storytelling-and got in more tidbits about ourselves. ![]() More concise ideas that we didn’t really do with the first one. So it is a collection of really good songs again-it’s definitely more our first album. But there was so much going on, just in life, that we had to sort through. “It’s just more concise,” Louie tells me of MID AIR, when I catch up with the Paris Texas over Zoom. At the time, as press interest in the multimedia creatives ramped up, Felix and Louie were quick to remind interviewers that they were only getting started-and they weren’t kidding. BOY ANONYMOUS was accompanied by its own short film, which cast the fellas as workaday employees of Ditch Maid, a “#1 Body Recovery Service.” Read: They make fresh corpses disappear. Each drew critical and fan praise that recalled the late-aughts discovery of fellow rowdy Californians Odd Future and Death Grips. They opened 2021 with a genre-blurring single, “HEAVY METAL,” followed by two breathtaking EPs, BOY ANONYMOUS and Red Hand Akimbo. None of this is a surprise to those who discovered Paris Texas two and a half years ago. "If that’s your only focus point of who we are," Louie (below) says, "well you’re dumb as shit. Whatever you do, don’t call Paris Texas rap-rock. MID AIR is surely-we say this not even seven months into 2023-one of the year’s greatest albums. It’s sharp, pummeling, irresistible, and insistent, even in its sweetest spots. Temperamentally, there’s a ton of angst, but also irony, laughs, sentiment, reflections on struggles and loss, wry takes on labels and guns, and occasionally, pure elation. ![]() MID AIR, the first full-length album from Paris Texas, delivers 16 tracks that thrillingly throw genre caution to the wind, as astute rap bars meet electropunk, drum 'n' bass, hard rock riffage, buzzing synths, funky breaks, alt-rock melodics and more. All of it has led up to last week’s release of the main event: one of the most anticipated records of the year. Along with the film, the group has recently turned out a string of music videos: “PANIC!!!,” “BULLET MAN,” “Everybody’s Safe Until…” and the new “DnD,” which paint a backdrop of the dystopian world in which Mars takes place. That’s the scenario envisioned in the short film Head High, from the absurdly creative minds behind Paris Texas-the experimental hip-hop duo of the pseudonymous Louie Pastel and Felix. Given how bleak things will be on Earth by then, who wouldn’t want to get away? Oh, right- going to Mars will be a thing by 2051. While the drugs fell into the guys’ laps, they may just provide enough of a monetary windfall for Louie to finally get a ticket to visit Mars. It’s all available from a ramshackle wooden stand-located at a nondescript corner in Los Angeles-where the pair toil away. Fancy any Tuner? Gunk? Maybe even some hard-to-find Panic? (Be careful with that one.) Well, Felix and Louie have you covered. It turns out that some of our needs haven’t changed: sodas, smokes, chips, and drugs. ![]()
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