Monthly Archives: July 2023

NME

Paris Texas: inside the year’s most inventive and unpredictable debut album

Paris Texas are just about ready to get off this planet. 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. “The sun is whoopin’ everybody’s ass,” they lament. “Earth finally threw in the towel.”

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 indeed whoopin’ everybody’s ass today. 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. He’s holding a cigarette in one hand and DJing from his phone with the other.

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. We hear Louisiana rapper Autumn!, then Brazilian psychedelic samba from Novos Baianos and Radiohead’s acoustic version of ‘Creep’. Beside him, his comrade Felix is weighing up the pros and cons of filming vs photo shoots. “In videos you’re in constant movement, so you’re not stuck on one dumb face,” he ponders. “Models are crazy! I don’t know how they do it.”

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ES Magazine

A far-out first date with LaKeith Stanfield

Glancing around at his surroundings, it isn’t hard to see why LaKeith Stanfield might, as he puts it, ‘feel adrift in history’. We’re sitting on wooden chairs in a cottage on the grounds of a Pasadena hotel that dates back to the Gilded Age. Stanfield has been living here for the past few weeks while he remodels his nearby home to mimic its rustic aesthetic: exposed oak beams, heavy velvet curtains, wrought iron pokers beside the fireplace. ‘I like feeling like I’m in a different time,’ he says. ‘That’s how this hotel makes me feel.’ It is, he says, his hideaway from the modern world. ‘I’m trying to find a hole and stay there,’ he smiles. ‘Especially these days, I’m really enjoying the things that matter, like family. Building my family and having those moments of sacredness is really important.’

Let’s bear with him for a moment, shall we? ‘I don’t know if it’s start-middle-end,’ he muses, his voice low and languid. ‘I view it as a revolution in a circle, a neverending loop.’ The 31-year-old (at least by conventional calendars) found himself pondering this concept on the set of his spooky new Disney movie, Haunted Mansion. ‘If you think about it like that, technically we’re ghosts,’ he continues. ‘The question is: do you want to be a good ghost or a bad ghost? You’re in someone’s dream right now, and you’re either haunting it or making it more pleasurable. My thing is: let’s make people’s dreams a little bit more fun and cooler, make them feel good if we can.’

Over the past decade Stanfield has established himself as the most compelling, charismatic and idiosyncratic actor of his generation. His lethargic charisma is endlessly malleable, allowing him to drift through time to play an Old West outlaw in The Harder They Fall or a 1960s FBI informant in Judas and the Black Messiah (earning an Oscar nomination in the process). He is best known, though, as the otherworldly Darius, who spent four seasons of Atlanta as the trippiest, most heartfelt character on television.

Continue reading at ES Magazine

NME

Liam Fender: “The North East has really got a buzz going on now”

This June, Liam Fender and his superstar brother Sam fulfilled a long-standing family ambition in a most unexpected way. “The Fender family is all Newcastle United mad, and all really good footballers: my dad, my uncles, my granddad was semi-professional,” explains Liam, speaking over video call from the spare bedroom at home in North Shields. “I came along and I’m fucking useless. I was that shit at football, I got bullied by a PE teacher! It soured the whole thing for us, and Sam’s by no means a footballer. So there was something quite heartening and amusing about the fact that the two shittest footballers in the family are the ones who can say we’ve played at St James’ Park!”

During those two sold-out nights at Newcastle’s Cathedral on the Hill, Liam joined Sam (who’s 9 years his junior) to duet on Bruce Springsteen’s slow-burning 1984 classic ‘I’m On Fire’. Now, Liam is preparing to release debut EP ‘Love Will…’, a rich collection of ballads and bawlers that showcases his knack for melody and sharp turn of phrase, as if Richard Hawley were from a bit further North.

Here, he tells NME about digging into the songwriting vaults he’s built up after 20 years of gigging, starting work on his first album and lending his support to a campaign to help men’s mental health in the North East during the cost of living crisis.

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