His death lurks in the shadows of ‘Mid Air’, a record which couldn’t help but be influenced by their shock and grief. Their recording sessions, however, were soon cut short by tragedy: Felix learned his father had died and rushed back to LA. In March 2022, Louie and Felix decamped to Mount Shasta, a quiet town at the northernmost edge of California, to focus on a full-length project away from the distractions of LA. “Once I got started I was very much like: ‘Alright, let me work as hard as I possibly can.’” “When you’re chasing something creative like music, that doesn’t conform, everybody – parents, girlfriends – deems you as lazy and thinks you don’t want to work hard,” says Louie. What once was a hobby had become their lives. That came in 2021 with the release of the viral single ‘Heavy Metal’, followed by mixtape ‘Boy Anonymous’ and second EP ‘Red Hand Akimbo’. Released that same year, debut EP ‘I’ll Get My Revenge In Hell’ picked up some buzz, but instead of running towards the hype they disappeared, waiting until they felt they had something truly worth saying. They thought the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate places suited their broad-ranging sound. In 2018 they officially formed Paris Texas, taking their name from a Wim Wenders film, inspired by a still from the movie they spotted on Tumblr. What really bonded the pair was their shared unwillingness to put out anything they didn’t truly love. “That was the initial plan: Get good at whatever you want to do, feel more comfortable, and then we’d be like: ‘Do your own thing, I’ll do my own thing.’ But, we ended up just constantly making music together.” They took the hint, and decided to help each other work on tunes. “We weren’t a group, but they’d always book us together,” explains Louie. It was fate that pushed them to join forces. In 2014, both Louie and Felix started playing small gigs at parties and art shows around LA, but still considered themselves separate artists.

“I felt like I didn’t earn the title of someone who made music, because I wasn’t putting it out.” Nothing he’d want to play to anyone, though. Credit: Ashley Osborn for NMEįelix, meanwhile, was busy scribbling down rhymes and tentatively recording using a home mic and a “shitty ass version of Pro Tools”. “He was like: ‘You might just want to quit school and do music full time.’” “My last semester there, I showed this kid Wes some beats and he was like: ‘You’re showing a lot of people beats, and I haven’t heard you talk about school one time!’” remembers Louie. Friends encouraged him to take music, which he saw as a hobby, seriously. By then, Louie was using Ableton on his laptop to make beats, playing them for anyone who’d listen. The pair met while attending community college in 2013, bonding over a shared love of underground rapper Robb Bank$. “At that time, I didn’t know I wanted to do music. “For the majority of middle school I was listening to ‘Get Em High’ a lot,” he recalls. ‘The College Dropout’ was on repeated rotation. In nearby South Central, Felix was stealing his older sister’s iPod so he could listen to early Drake mixtapes, Lil Wayne and Kanye. “Music wasn’t really at the forefront of what I wanted to do.” “I just liked creating stuff,” he explains, taking a seat on a couch. In fact, growing up in Compton, Louie originally dreamed of becoming an actor, or a comic book artist. The absurd, acerbic clips showcase their boundless creativity, and a knack for storytelling that transcends music. In anticipation of ‘Mid Air’, Paris Texas recently put out a string of music videos themed around the idea of blasting off to Mars – some hosted by longtime friend Mac DeMarco. “Models are crazy! I don’t know how they do it.” “In videos you’re in constant movement, so you’re not stuck on one dumb face,” he ponders.

Beside him, his comrade Felix is weighing up the pros and cons of filming vs photo shoots. We hear Louisiana rapper Autumn!, then Brazilian psychedelic samba from Novos Baianos and Radiohead’s acoustic version of ‘Creep’. The sounds filling the room are as eclectic as you’d expect of a group that have drawn comparisons with Odd Future and Death Grips but who defy easy categorisation. He’s holding a cigarette in one hand and DJing from his phone with the other. In a warehouse studio booked out for their NME cover shoot, rapper-producer Louie Pastel has his shirt off and a weathered MTV cap pushed back on his head. The sun is indeed whoopin’ everybody’s ass today. On a blazingly hot afternoon in downtown Los Angeles, it isn’t hard to see how the pair arrived at that apocalyptic conclusion. “ The sun is whoopin’ everybody’s ass,” they lament. On ‘Mid Air’, the LA punk-rap duo’s thrill-packed debut album, they trade bars about escaping this doomed rock by saving up enough cash for a one way ticket to Mars. Paris Texas are just about ready to get off this planet.

Paris love and hip hop