Paris Texas: A Raw and Rapid Interview

This article originally appeared in ‘Hypebeast Magazine Issue 32: The Fever Issue.’ Please visit HBX to grab your copy.

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Paris Texas, the Compton-based hip-hop duo, make it a point to be agnostic about categorizing their music. Their debut album MID AIR doesn’t sway in any particular direction or fit under industry-fueled, catch-all descriptors. When asked about genre, members Louie Pastel and Felix instead emphasize that they’re simply writing about life’s emotional highs and lows. The guys are too busy crafting rhymes about cheeky international rendezvous and heavy-hitting family drama to be concerned with pigeonholing their sound or pretending to “say, act, and present [themselves] in a certain way.”

And with a record full of gnarly guitar, static crunches, and flows that sometimes resemble the staccato screech of a hardcore frontman, the result is less “experimental” than intentional, controlled chaos. In other words, there’s no formula or paint-by-numbers template to MID AIR. Some songs get bookended with hallucinatory drum machine beats, while others feature laidback synths that are suited for a midnight cruise along the 405. The eclectic production is anchored by Louie Pastel and Felix’s consistently acerbic lyrics, which waver in subject matter from the poignant to the hilariously crass.

Authenticity has been a constant MO for the longtime friends. Since forming in 2018, Paris Texas’s success parallels their recent album’s title: They’ve taken off and navigated a whirlwind of new heights, all while staying true to their self-described “goofy” selves. Highlights include performing at Coachella, appearing on magazine covers, and racking up dizzying stream counts on an LP they describe as over- caffeinated. They’ve also embraced a multimedia approach to album rollouts, including complementary short films, a video game, and a tripped-out billboard teasing their festival appearances. “We wanted to do our own thing from the gate,” explains Felix.

It was natural for the duo to translate their relentless energy into a cohesive album—a feat they accomplished by exclusively “trying to impress each other,” not other people. This is also emblematic in the way they craft verses that build and play off each other, like friends who start an inside joke and compete to add more to the riff. Ultimately, the two artists have forged something that could only be described as a Paris Texas hitter—a fully-realized, wholly-distinct debut that suggests their creative pace will keep revving up from here.

Where does the urgent, manic energy that drives MID AIR come from?

Felix: I don’t even know, just wanting to turn up. That desire can be felt in the music.

Louie Pastel: Coffee, too much coffee. Drink that amount of caffeine, and the music’s
gonna sound like that.

Felix: I don’t drink coffee.

Louie Pastel: You’re also not making the beats…

Felix: Yeah, but I’m yelling on the tracks.

Louie Pastel: But, it’s my energy that transfers over to you. Now, we both get a contact high, feel me? I have so much caffeine in me.

Paris Texas has been around since 2018, so how do you feel about still being called “experimental”?

Felix: It’s kind of dumb. I don’t like it.

Louie Pastel: I don’t like it, either. I don’t think we’re that experimental. You know what’s really funny about getting called that? “Experimental” comes with a certain type of expectation, like this weird box where you have to say, act, and present yourself in a certain way.

Do you guys disagree while making music?

Louie Pastel: Not really.

Felix: I think we did on the song “…We Fall.” Because n*ggas wanted it shorter, then they said it was too long. They didn’t want me to rap on it. So, it took even longer [to make] because the only thing you think about is n*ggas not wanting you on the song and thinking it should be different. Then, you get in your head about it. N*gga wrote like five different verses to that one beat.

Your lyrics include storytelling, but does anything from real life inspire your music?

Felix: Literally, just real life [as a whole]. It takes a while, but you realize how much speaking your truth and sharing what you’ve experienced in your life can be as heavy-hitting as the wittiest metaphor. You could say the craziest things about life, but because a lot of experiences or emotions are shared, people can still relate. Providing those feelings in your music will resonate more than being the most creative lyricist with the wordplay stuff. “Earth-2” was about me having an internet crush on someone, but then she started dating a basketball player. I never knew her, though, so it’s fine. And “Ain’t No High” was inspired by a real story from when my sister first got diagnosed with schizophrenia.

As Paris Texas becomes more famous, how do the artist persona versions of Louie Pastel and Felix compare to the actual people?

Louie Pastel: At this point in time, they’re probably synonymous.

Felix: It’s hard to play between the two, for sure. I’m a goofy dude.

Louie Pastel: We’re both goofy dudes. As artists, I feel like Felix is probably more of a caricature of my thoughts or emotions—a warped extension of my own self. I think it would be different if I had more of a story-driven thing going, but I’ve chosen to make my artist persona closer to who I am in real life.

MID AIR also has lyrics about fan interactions. What type of music fans were you while growing up?

Louie Pastel: I was a crazy gatekeeper. I liked having music that nobody knew about. I was crazy with it when I was younger. Now, I’m more open-minded, but back in the day, I got off from that. Like, “This band has zero followers, but they’re tight to me.” I like having that personal connection between me and the band, rapper, or whoever I liked.

Felix: I was nerding out. If I found an artist, I used to go down the catalog. It was crazy because it would unveil people who worked together in the past, people who I didn’t think would know each other. I’d be wanting to talk to n*ggas who inspired me with lyrics, beats, and their impact on music, but they’d just be trying to get hoes. N*ggas had to tell me to calm down, so I stopped asking.

In a podcast, you mentioned rapping on rap-rock beats, which are “usually white.” Why are you interested in exploring these cultural flips through your music?

Louie Pastel: I feel like I grew up in that culture. I’d get called “whitewashed” because I liked rock and I thought that was really funny. Now that I have that in my arsenal, I can use it to my advantage. It’s like, “Let me see what this sounds like, let me see if I can play both sides.”

Felix: That for sure happened when n*ggas was growing up. They’d be like, “Why do you talk like that?” I’m like, “What do you mean, bro? I’m just talking.” I didn’t think it was weird. But now it’s crazy because if you see a white n*gga on the internet doing a really clean Nae-Nae, it’s OK. Everybody’s like, “Oh bet, he’s going off.” That’s crazy bro, because I’m rapping over this and people are like, “No, but if a white n*gga does drill, it’s like, Oh my god…”

How has your musical journey changed your friendship?

Louie Pastel: Not much, honestly. It sucks sometimes because we’re so used to being friends. When it’s business time, we might have a different idea of how our processes work. If we were to go to the studio and make 30 songs like “Full English,” it’d be mad easy because that’s how we naturally are, joking around. It becomes interesting to find a way to work together, as opposed to being homies. I think the homie part of it is important, though. If I ever felt like this project was a detriment to our friendship, I’d probably quit.

When making MID AIR, was there a moment where you felt like you were truly taking off?

Louie Pastel: When we made “Ain’t No High.” That was one of the earlier ones we finished, and I was like, “OK, something’s getting formed.” That sounds crazy, but that song was our parachute song—now I know I’m gonna hit the ground safely [laughs]. This album is gonna be something, even if they hate the 15 other songs, because this is the song everybody’s gonna like.

Felix: I felt really strongly about “Lift Off” and then the second half of “…We Fall.” Even when it was being played back later, I’d still be able to recall the time when we first recorded it and thought, “Oh shit, this is the outro.” It was crazy.

Why is it important to release supplementary material around your music like short films, a video game, and a pre-Coachella billboard?

Felix: We wanted to do our own thing right out the gate.

Louie Pastel: People often want [to project] a certain idea of themselves. Either they’re pretentious, they wanna be popular, or whatever else. What they do stems from those wants and that desire to be recognized—where we already recognized ourselves as being pretty cool. We just do what we want with everything. We’re trying to impress each other more than impress other people.

Felix: Everything changes and evolves over time. Rolling out an album and a short film at the same time would have been a lot harder to do a few years ago. Now, everybody’s trying to find their own way to push the standard. It’s like the evolved version of rolling shit out, if you care to do it.

Do you have future plans for Paris Texas, or are you figuring it out as things unfold?

Louie Pastel: We have it planned out.

Felix: We do?

Louie Pastel: I do. You don’t listen.

Felix: N*ggas won’t tell you nothing. I feel like half-and–half, but shit be changing. Even with MID AIR, there was an idea of what the project was supposed to be, then it changed. Shit be changing…

Louie Pastel: But the skeletal version is still there.

Felix: For sure. I’m just saying: shit be changing.