Band To Watch: Fashion Club

A Love You Cannot Shake, the sophomore album from Fashion Club, starts with a lumbering, stuttering synth impossible to place. Pascal Stevenson tells me the synth is a vocoded, time-stretched kick drum, manipulated and looped in Ableton. That’s just one of many instances I could ask about. Not a moment goes by without something distorted and alien; even the quieter songs feature mangled vocals, pitch shifted in the margins of the mix.

That might sound like a collection of music too experimental to connect, but the Ableton wizardry is in service of an epic art-rock album in the vein of Perfume Genius’ No Shape or Torres’ Three Futures. When asked whether she considers the album a pop record, Stevenson inadvertently explains the kind of big swing we’re dealing with here: “For better or worse… pop music strives to have mainstream appeal, and I don’t think the record has that. But I’m definitely influenced by pop music in the sense that I love hooks.” These songs can be as weird and dynamic as possible, but at their core they’re relatively straightforward, often as simple as two or three looped chords.

There’s no Blake Mills behind the boards here, just Stevenson, self-producing and mixing entirely herself. She did that on her 2021 debut Scrutiny, too, but as strong as that record was, Love is a massive leap. It’s the kind of dense, go-for-broke record artists make after years of building up goodwill, and it’s her second one. Not that she’s a novice: As a teen, Stevenson frequented Los Angeles DIY venue the Smell, seeing noise shows. She got into circuit bending and playing with guitar pedals, and soon went to CalArts for music technology. After college, she joined post-punk band Moaning, which Stevenson quips “ostensibly still exists,” putting her love of synths and audio on the backburner as that band picked up buzz. Still, she worked on electronic demos while touring with Moaning and other groups like the now-defunct Girlpool – drawing from the same reference points, but with a grander scope.

It wasn’t until getting sober that she was able to write Scrutiny. It’s an intense record, confrontational towards others (inauthentic activists on “Pantomime”) and herself (the challenges of getting sober on “Dependency”). In a vacuum, Scrutiny is a great debut, but not quite what Pascal wanted to make. “When I was making Scrutiny, I was like, ‘What is something that feels tapped-in emotionally, that people expect from somebody like me?’” On that album, that meant the Cure and Brian Eno, so the material took on a darker tone. At the time, she was closeted, and that meant she was seen as a guy in a post-punk band, albeit a rare Black artist operating in the genre – so it wound up not far from Moaning.

In the years between Scrutiny’s creation and its release, Stevenson finally came out, and that freedom explains why A Love You Cannot Shake is uncompromising. It’s not a “coming out” record; it’s more about the difficulty that comes after the transition. There’s a new vulnerability and tenderness that wasn’t there previously, something she hadn’t openly expressed while writing Scrutiny, but she retains the brutal honesty of that album. On songs like “Enough” and “Faith”, gender transition is fake-it-till-you-make-it: “This figure might feel hideous/ I will carry on in spite of it/ All dressed up in happiness/ Until maybe one day I believe it,” she sings on “Faith.” Striking lead single “Forget”, featuring Perfume Genius, depicts a journey towards self-forgiveness in the context of transition: “What if changing doesn’t change a thing?/ I’d still tear my world apart/ Just to keep from wondering.” Gender only explicitly comes up once, the climax of centerpiece “Enough.” If you can make out the submerged vocals on “Enough”, she directly asks, “if I treat myself gently, would you love me like a girl?”

After the initial euphoric peace of coming out wears off, you’re still trapped in a capitalist society that doesn’t value you or what you can contribute to the world. The friction between self-actualization and systemic oppression can burn anyone out, and that’s where new single “Confusion” comes in. “Confusion” is one of a handful of outright upbeat songs on the record, the closest thing to Scrutiny’s more traditional band setup. For “Confusion,” Stevenson was inspired by trip-hop legends Portishead and Sneaker Pimps, recording drum loops with her drummer Andrew MacKelvie (also of Moaning) before putting that into, naturally, Ableton.

So much of Scrutiny was written in second-person, an accusatory “you” aimed at faux activists and would-be provocateurs alike. “Confusion” is first-person, but still pointed in its critique: Stevenson is burnt out, working to no avail, unable to break any cycles. The idea that your value as a human exists independently of your value to capitalism is comforting, but that can only go so far: “If I can’t earn what I deserve/ Maybe it’s nothing that I’m worth/ I get by on delusion.” While this internal conflict is going on, synths whirr, unexpectedly recalling Oracular Spectacular-style indie pop despite Stevenson’s commanding vocal.

There’s so much going on in any given song, the emotional core might take a while to register, but it’s much easier to find this time around. For this record, she embraced influences she’d previously avoided, like Kate Bush and Sade, and ensured whatever she made would better reflect her music taste: In a reference playlist shared with Stereogum, Fennesz, Charli XCX, Janet Jackson (specifically The Velvet Rope), and Deftones all make appearances. Stevenson clarifies about her playlist, “The way that I make music and the way I produce… the reason [some songs] are on there is one second that happens in the song.” Listening to the album, it’s possible to hear traces of every single song on that playlist, whether it’s FKA Twigs’ “Sad Day” on “Deny” or Linkin Park’s “Breaking The Habit” on “Ice Age.” Incredibly, the record coheres; every song feels massive in its own ways, with extreme dynamic shifts and distortion that stops just short of overload. Stevenson is fully in control; it’s never Pascal Stevenson Does X Genre, because there’s eventually too much going on to even say what genre she’s tackling.

While Stevenson handles most of the instrumentation, a cast of beloved indie figures joins her – not just Mike Hadreas, but Jay Som on the jungle-leaning “Ghost” and Julie Byrne on “Rotten Mind”. While Scrutiny featured Sasami on a handful of songs, Stevenson wanted a greater emphasis on collaboration: “I have a producer brain first and foremost, and I know my limits, and sometimes I want things that I don’t think I can bring to a song.” She’d already known Hadreas through Lillie West of Lala Lala, and Melina Duterte (herself an accomplished self-producer and engineer) through her publicist, but Byrne was a fully cold email. Stevenson adds that collaboration makes the process of finishing music much easier: “If I have to listen to a song I made, I’m like, ‘I’m the only person I have to be the judge of whether this is good enough to put out.’ For ‘Forget,’ I can be like, ‘Mike thinks this is good, so it must be good.’”

Stevenson just finished a tour with Protomartyr, and while that seems like an unlikely combination, Protomartyr frequently also indulge in the genre stretching Stevenson loves to do with Fashion Club. Stevenson even finds commonality with the way hooks organically arise from Joe Casey’s shout-singing: “He has such an interesting style, because you listen to everything and even when it is more hardcore-adjacent and fast, there are really strong melodies in all of that music… Seeing him live now, it’s crazy to hear these songs every night and really start to pick out how beautiful some of them are.” Continuing her eclectic taste, she’s currently listening to Eiko Ishibashi’s Evil Does Not Exist score and 2000s Timbaland-helmed records like Missy Elliott’s This Is Not A Test! and Nelly Furtado’s Loose.

With this record finished, Stevenson is excited to work on more music for other people: She just co-produced and co-mixed “Many Ways” by Clarity (featuring Clairo) for Transa, an upcoming compilation featuring Sade herself, one of Stevenson’s biggest influences. Stevenson views A Love You Cannot Shake as a calling card for her capabilities as a producer and engineer: “First and foremost it feels like a record I needed to make to sort through a lot of painful and uncomfortable emotions. But I think it was also important to show like, ‘Hey, you can make a record that has this really grandiose production… but still has a heart at the center.’”

Infamously, non-male producers make up an extremely small portion of their field, even less for women of color and certainly even less for trans women of color. Stevenson’s work here is undeniable on its own terms, but it’s also particularly necessary through that lens. Toward the end of “Ice Age,” the massive wall of sound drops out to reveal just Stevenson and her guitar, a rare moment when A Love You Cannot Shake sounds anything but hi-fi. I ask if that’s from an early demo of the song, and with a mischievous smile, she says, “No, that’s dishonest. But I wanted it to sound like it was!”