Usually, people are wrong as shit.įelix, once that sound started to take off, how did you feel about going in that direction?į: We knew what the landscape was for that sound, and I was like, “Man, I hope n***as don’t think it stops here. One day I’ll have a book, and people will know where I pull from. I’m just gonna do it the way I know how to do it. I’m not gonna be a pop punk guy because that’s just corny. I’m not gonna do that because they’ve already done it. They used 808s and all these things that you use usually for hip-hop, and they made it something different. That’s what made it special: they formed a new instrument. The reason why people in the last couple years have been able to really do it right - Trippie and Juice and X - was because they were doing it over hip-hop beats. But that type of music died for a very specific reason. Pop-punk revival… Let’s be very real: It’s tight and I fuck with it still. It’s like a white person being like, “I know who Drake is.” You’ll get an interview, like, “What’d you listen to?” “Paramore and Panic! at the Disco.” “No shit. People wear it on their sleeves now that they fuck with it, but fucking with it because it looks cool to be the Black person that’s not a monolith among everybody else. Every time I would show people the type of music I was into before rap, it was so looked down upon. It was a part of myself that I was pushing down for a long time. But once Boy Anonymous came out and people were receptive to Heavy Metal, it gave me the confidence to pursue it. If people heard the beats I was making before that project, they’d be shocked. It was just, “I have a guitar, let’s do the thing.” But with Red Hand Akimbo, I was like, “Oh, y’all with this? All right, let me show you what this sounds like if I took it seriously.” With “Heavy Metal,” I was just like, “This sounds cool.” And it was never my intention to continue down that path. The rap-rock thing was never intentional. Tell me about the evolution from Boy Anonymous to Red Hand Akimbo to Mid Air: how you fine-tuned what you wanted to say, and how you wanted to say it, and the way the sounds came out. When I came to Felix with ideas, there was always a script on the side: “We’re gonna do this project, and we’re gonna have a short film on the side of it.” It’s always been a goal to do the film stuff over the music stuff, and rap was the easiest way. I just really like movies and creating a storyline. I wasn’t chasing it for any type of notoriety. When I got out of high school, I just liked doing this thing. Shout out to y’all for being brave… Hell no.” I remember them doing a talent show: They just went on stage and started screaming and doing heavy shit. I went to high school with two kids who were about the screamo, and I really looked up to them. I’m not gonna be a Black dude who perms his hair and wears Naruto shit. When you’d go to Warped Tour back then, they’d expect you to put on the costume. No one around me is even in a band.” And I wouldn’t put on the costume. No one around me is listening to this music. I was also like, “I’m Black.” Trying to go into those spaces was way harder than anybody could possibly imagine, especially back then. A lot of music I was into during a certain era, I could see it was dying. LP: It was before I met him, actually, that I started dabbling more into rap. Their world is one of bold emotion and heavy stepping. With Mid Air, Paris Texas prove that the runaway success of “Heavy Metal” was no fluke. But even at their most thoughtful and reflective, they never fail to come through with the kind of bangers geared to punch holes through concrete. Much of the writing confronts their status as outsiders, their feelings of loneliness, and not fitting into certain perceptions of Blackness. Mid Air, their new album, is Paris Texas at their most focused and confident. And the world would have to wait till 2021 to hear what would become their signature sound on “Heavy Metal,” a firecracker single from their debut album, Boy Anonymous. It would take a handful of years of live performances and tossing ideas around before they released their debut EP, I’ll Get My Revenge In Hell, in 2018. They met for the first time in college and bonded over Florida rapper Robb Bank$ before deciding to work together. Both Louie and Felix grew up listening to rap music but took vastly different approaches as they reached their late teens: Felix embraced the then-new frontier of the blog era, while Pastel settled more into the worlds of rock and rock-adjacent sounds.
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