Fashion Club, the alias of Los Angeles-based artist Pascal Stevenson, has released her highly anticipated sophomore album, A Love You Cannot Shake, out now via Felte Records. Alongside the release she’s announced a run of West Coast tour dates. Tickets available HERE.
Though A Love You Cannot Shake is the first album that explicitly addresses Stevenson’s transness, it’s not so much a “coming out” record or a confessional, straightforward tell-all as it is a tastefully abstract distillation of her personal experiences and identities into stirring vignettes that anyone can relate to.
With this album, Stevenson masterfully executes a daring vision and chronicles how far she’s come in several facets. Sonically, she says, “It feels like the album I’ve wanted to make for the past 10 years, but didn’t have the musical vocabulary to or was scared to,” and personally, she says, “I am, for once in my life, finally feeling something I’ve been reaching for forever, and I want to live in that feeling for the rest of my life.”
Stevenson was inspired by the movements and storytelling of classical music, and she even picked up the upright bass again for this record, despite not touching the instrument for years. While Stevenson handled most of the instrumentals on her 2022 debut Scrutiny, this LP is much more collaborative, featuring an array of contributors who lent strings, piano, pedal steel and more. Plus, this album boasts country harmonies from Perfume Genius (“Forget”), high-pitched coos from Jay Som (“Ghost”) and gauzy whispers from Julie Byrne (“Rotten Mind”). Stevenson’s vocal evolution is also on display with this record, embracing a softer delivery that’s more reflective of her personality and identity.
A Love You Cannot Shake vehemently encourages a walk towards the edge and into the sultry glow—after all, it’s cold out here in the cynical abyss of our minds.
Tracklist:
01 Faith
02 Confusion
03 Forget (feat. Perfume Genius)
05 Enough
06 One Day
07 Ice Age
08 Deny
09 Rotten Mind (feat. Julie Byrne)
10 Deify
In addition to years touring in her Sub Pop signed post-punk group Moaning, Stevenson has spent time performing as a member of Girlpool, SASAMI, and Cherry Glazerr. Fashion Club has toured supporting The Breeders, Ed Schrader’s Music Beat, Lala Lala, Deradoorian and just wrapped an East Coast run with Protomartyr earlier this Summer.
Later this year Fashion Club will embark on a run of West Coast dates, kicking off on December 9th at Zebulon in Los Angeles alongside New York experimental harp & violin duo LEYA before heading to San Francisco, Seattle, and Portland.
Tour Dates:
12/09 – Los Angeles, CA @ Zebulon w/ LEYA
12/10 – San Francisco, CA @ Knockout
12/12 – Seattle, WA @ Black Lodge
12/14 – Portland, OR @ The Six
Listening to Fashion Club’s self-produced second album A Love You Cannot Shake feels like being caught in the crossfire of a profound beam of light. You can’t help but feel both enlivened and exposed as its aberrant synth lines, artful strings and disfigured guitars swell into larger-than-life crescendos, which evoke a divine yet probing spotlight. You can bask in the glow of a towering light with self-assured poise, but there’s also something inherently uncomfortable about an imposing light source—revealing yourself to onlookers (and oneself) comes with varying levels of anxiety and self-doubt. This is the tension at the heart of A Love You Cannot Shake, a record of lush radiance and otherworldly scope, with each track functioning as its own twinkling, transportive realm.
Pascal Stevenson, the Los Angeles-based musician behind Fashion Club, likens the experience of hearing A Love You Cannot Shake to staring into the sun, and though the record wasn’t written with religion in mind, its heavenly sonics and emotional sagacity also make it feel like a prophetic encounter. The album was shaped by Stevenson’s gender transition and sobriety journey and parses her fluid emotions surrounding these events and other personal trials and tribulations. But as much as it’s a dialogue between Stevenson’s current and former selves, it’s also an invitation for listeners to join her in the work of discarding bitterness and recentering hope, especially when such efforts feel futile. Musically, A Love You Cannot Shake is an unshackling of expectations, as Stevenson’s previous stint as bassist in the L.A. post-punk outfit Moaning and her first record as Fashion Club, 2022’s Scrutiny, didn’t necessarily reflect the full range of her taste, which includes ambient, pop, classical and dance music, or embody her sensitive tenderness and femininity.
“By the time Scrutiny came out, I had transitioned, and I was making different music and caring about different things,” Stevenson says. “I felt less held back by ‘Oh I’m this kind of person, I have to make this kind of music,’ and I reached a point where I was like, ‘Let me just try to write a bunch of songs on acoustic guitar and piano, where I think the songs are good and have a solid core and then start producing them and see what happens if I don’t put any limitations in place.’”
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