Fashion Club - A Love You Cannot Shake (Red Vinyl)

Pascal Stevenson, also known by her moniker Fashion Club, has the peculiar gift of creating sonic landscapes by simply describing them aloud. Sitting on the outdoor patio of a cafe in Glendale, the musician and producer conjures up the image of driving through the mountains in the rain while listening to the radio: Whitney Houston’s powerful voice is struggling to push through the static interference as water drums against the windshield, the sounds seamlessly blending together to create something “unreal and irreplicable,” as she puts it.

It’s thought experiments like these that inspired her sophomore solo album A Love You Cannot Shake, out October 25 from Felte. The powering up of the Duracell chime, the strike of a match, the uncorking of a bottle — all of these sounds contain a certain momentum and force she finds compelling. “I’m really drawn to really overwhelming string sounds,” she tells me, citing more examples. “I grew up with that kind of stuff because I always played in orchestras. I feel like there’s weird random sounds from my youth that are stuck in my head.”

The 32-old musician was raised around music, taking after her bass-playing father by picking up the upright bass herself in the sixth grade. In 2008, during her teenage years, she joined the Los Angeles indie-folk band Moses Campbell and went on to spend her twenties playing with her band Moaning, a new-wave/post-punk band that landed a Sub Pop deal.

While both of her albums as Fashion Club have come out after she came out as transgender in 2020, the first was recorded prior to her transition. In 2018, while on tour with Moaning, Stevenson began writing the tracks that would ultimately form her 2022 debut solo album as Fashion Club, Scrutiny — a gothic new romantic affair with glam-rock flourishes. The standout track "Feign for Love" featured a wistful guitar riff that rang like an angelic siren, hinting at the melodrama that A Love You Cannot Shake would relish in.