In our  „Band of the Week“-interview last year, Pays P. mentioned that new things were to come – in particular, a first official release was to be recorded in Brooklyn, New York. We’ll come back to it momentarily, but that was not the only thing that was about to happen for the trio from Paris: After sharing the stage with Big Thief’s Buck Meek at one of his solo concerts last summer, Laura Boullic (lyrics), Lucas Valero (guitar) and Pablo Valero (drums) were invited by their New York colleagues to join the mediterranean leg of their European tour as support band earlier this spring. While this tour, like so many others, was eventually brought up short by the corona pandemic, Pays P. were still able to play their part of it as scheduled. Audience and critics alike greeted them with great warmth, according to the reviews, undeterred by the change of pace and genre between the Parisians‘ surging structures of heavy, sometimes slightly sludge-tinted, interwoven sounds and words, and the New Yorkers‘ dark indie-folk-post-everything extraordinaire. Of course, whoever likes one of the two is bound not to care much about genre limits anyway. And the best match in an evening’s bill is maybe not made by genre at all, but by a shared attitude, a radical love for music, and for the world with its beauty and ugliness alike, sounded out by extreme musical measures, with immense skill and determination. (Further proof: For the rest of the tour, Big Thief were supported by British metalcore innovators Ithaca; this, too, and maybe surprisingly, worked perfectly.)

From this tour, a four track recording of Pays P.’s gig at L’Épicerie Moderne, Lyon, is to be found on Soundcloud. It gives a good impression of the band‘s live qualities and, with three new songs, of the direction their debut album might be taking. Weiterlesen