Fashion Club is the solo recording project of Los Angeles based musician Pascal Stevenson. Combining a love of auteur sound production and devastating pop songwriting, Fashion Club is a complex self-portrait. She explores the mind's complex relationship to morality, and the way structures of power tend to replicate themselves through unexamined habits.
Stevenson has been diligently crafting tracks for the project sine 2018 while being a founding member of Moaning (Sub Pop) and contributing to bands like Shit Giver. Part of the fertile Los Angeles DIY scene for more than a decade, Stevenson has also produced an album by Lunch Lady (Upset The Rhythm), contributed bass on some songs for Sasami’s (Domino) debut album, played bass live in the past with Cherry Glazerr (Secretly Canadian) and presently with Girlpool (Anti).
Stevenson began writing songs that would become her debut album Scrutiny toward the end of 2018, as Moaning embarked on a European tour in support of their critically acclaimed first album. Connecting directly with live audiences night after night reinvigorated her relationship to making music. Between shows, in the back of the band's tour van, she traced early drafts of Scrutiny's instrumentals on her laptop, planting the seeds of what would bloom into her captivating solo debut.
In early 2019, about a year after getting sober, the Los Angeles-based musician began the process of threading lyrics into the songs she had written on tour. She found herself in the midst of a deeply generative period of self-reflection. "Not having that veil of intoxication all the time confronts you with an opportunity to inspect a lot of things about yourself," she says. The writing process also provided an opening for her to consider questions of ethics, responsibility, self-deception, and power more broadly -- questions about how deeply systems of social control can take root.
