Get ready, El Paso! On Thursday, Aug. 13, Parlour Magic will bring its electrifying rock sound to Love Buzz for its highly anticipated Texas debut. Luc Bokor-Smith and his bandmates Erez Levin, Chris Blanchard and Gus Benson will bring their “Touring the Embassy” tour and latest album to the Sun City.

Bokor-Smith, the driving force behind Parlour Magic, shared his excitement with The City Magazine about the upcoming performance.

“I’ve actually been to El Paso,” Bokor-Smith recalled. “I spent a couple of days in El Paso in 2019 or so. I completely, seriously, fell in love with the city. We had so much fun. The people are great and the food is amazing. I’ve actually been wanting to go back and the fact that I get to do it with the band, in this context, is just so exciting.”

Photo by Bobby Nicholas

His enthusiasm for returning reflects a connection to the city that he hopes to bring to the band’s performance.

Parlour Magic’s band-driven sound and live performances offer a different experience from the group’s earlier electronic and vintage-pop sound, transforming the music into a full-blown rock show.

Speaking with The City Magazine, Bokor-Smith shared more about the production behind the band’s latest music and upcoming shows.

Bokor-Smith: This one’s a little more grittier. I think it has a more urgent feel, a more energetic pulse behind it. Going to the studio, I certainly knew that I wanted this one to sound like people playing in a room. I wanted to sound like a band rather than just a solo project. That was definitely the goal going into the studio and I think it went reasonably well. I feel like “The Embassy” sounds like an album that was made by people who were having a good time in a recording studio and that just made it even easier to translate it live.

TCM: What should audience members know about the shows you’ll be performing for your latest album?

Bokor-Smith: Parlour Magic has historically been very electronic and a lot of synthesizers. It’s really a different thing entirely and that’s been so much fun to sort of develop at home over the last couple of years. It’s very much a rock show. It’s high energy. The players are great. There’s a lot of fun moments where there’s a well-extended outro and we turn it into this jam or pick up the tempos. It’s a show that you’re definitely going to leave thinking you can feel like you’ve seen a rock show. Especially with this new album, it’s sort of our rockiest album to date, with the most guitars and we got live drums instead of sequence drums. So, it’s just translated really well live.

Recorded between Berlin and New York, “The Embassy” marks a shift from Parlour Magic’s earlier synth-pop sound toward a full-band, guitar-driven approach while retaining the group’s signature production and vocal style.

Photo by Bobby Nicholas

TCM: You travel with a substantial amount of gear. Can you tell us more about what you’ll be using during the shows?

Bokor-Smith: We use a vintage synthesizer called the Roland Juno 60 that I’ve been playing for years and years. I even named my dog after it. We definitely want to bring the feel of a full-blown show to any venue we play. So to do that, we have a pretty big footprint of gear. We have a newer Juno called the Juno X. Everyone has multiple guitars. Our drum kit is also triggering samples for the older material. It creates this really cool hybrid effect; it’s very much a band playing live on stage, but with enough of the studio production retained in the show. I didn’t want to have a bunch of backing tracks doing stuff that we real people should be doing. So, by layering synthesizers that are both on our keyboards, we were able to get to this sort of place where it is live but it’s being accentuated by triggering samples and songs that were actually used during the making of the record.

Photo by Bobby Nicholas

TCM: You find comfort and inspiration for your writing process in transient spaces, which makes it fitting that I caught you in a cab for this conversation. What else can you share about your writing process?

Bokor-Smith: The first two albums I wrote entirely on my own and that was its own process that I felt necessary at the time to sort of establish what the identity of Parlour Magic really was. On “The Embassy,” the fun there came from having been in a band, touring “Saturn Return,” and realizing how much fun it is to collaborate. We had quite a big group with us in the studio. The process of making this record was very much defined by the spirit of collaboration. I wanted to open it up a little bit and I wanted to get more people involved. I wanted to get more guitars involved. I did a lot of writing in Berlin and I have a couple collaborators who worked there, and that was sort of the beginning of the process last year.

Photo by Bobby Nicholas

TCM: Parlour Magic blends futuristic sounds with retro and vintage-pop influences, creating music that seems to exist between those two spaces. How did you arrive at that sound?

Bokor-Smith: I have a somewhat of a background in visual art, and I think a lot of it comes from that. I think that as I’m writing, both the music and lyrics, I’m imagining where it takes place visually. I want to see the room that it’s in. That’s always been the important part of the process for me: visualizing and understanding where it is I’m trying to go with this particular piece of music.

TCM: Is there anything you would like El Paso to know about Parlour Magic and the tour?

Bokor-Smith: From what I have personally experienced in El Paso, I genuinely think our music and the energy in our live shows will do really, really well there. I have a very fond memory of being in El Paso, and when the tour was being planned, seeing El Paso on the list was a fun moment for me. I have my hopes for this. I think we bring this kind of energy that certainly I recognize from the people that I met there. We’re all excited for this.