Paycheque – Generic Actress
Paycheque announce their self-titled debut album out June 12 via Mansions and Millions and release the single “Generic Actress.”
On the single, Paycheque share: “In LA, when you go out, you end up spending a lot of time standing outside of whatever event or party you’ve decided to attend. You’re on the sidewalk, you’re in a strip mall parking lot, you’re on a patio. You smoke, you bump into friends, and you eventually realize you missed half the set you came to see, you never actually made it inside the gallery, the party is winding down. This song is an ode to never quite making it inside. Sonically, we think of this song as kind of a synth-pop version of an early Cars hit; it’s our attempt to make a propulsive new wave anthem.”
Paycheque began with a chance meeting on the patio of Los Angeles venue Zebulon in February 2020, just before the world shut down. Allison Goldfarb, a filmmaker and musician from St. Louis, and Jackson MacIntosh, a member of TOPS and Drugdealer and a longtime fixture in the Montreal music scene, had been orbiting similar social circles before being introduced at a mutual friend’s show. They struck up an immediate friendship and exchanged mix CDs, bonding over a shared love of sophisti-pop and italo. As the COVID lockdown set in and tours and work disappeared, the duo retreated to a garage studio to play with synthesizers and drum machines, where they discovered their chemistry extended to songwriting. Their formless synth jams quickly coalesced into the polished, artfully arranged pop songs that would form their first album.
Paycheque’s debut LP wears its 80s pop influences on its sleeve, awash with gated drums, clean guitar lines, and vintage hardware synths. But if you look past these spatial and temporal origin points, one finds a record that is very much of present-day Los Angeles. Recorded throughout 2024 and 2025 in a home studio right next to their kitchen, Goldfarb and MacIntosh saw the roof of the abandoned stables in their backyard ripped away by the Santa Ana winds that fueled the region’s devastating fires. Soon after the completion of the record, the house itself was fated for demolition. This sense of impermanence, long characteristic of Los Angeles but now newly urgent, haunts the album.
Paycheque are keen observers of this brittle Los Angeles: the uncertainty that comes from fire and ICE, the capriciousness of its metonymic entertainment industries, the superficiality that accompanies ambition, and, underneath it all, the aleatory nature of art, love, and success. The album’s sensibility is evident in the band’s name itself, which cheekily gestures at and distinguishes itself from its influences. The Canadian English evokes the duo’s Montreal history, while the quotidian nature of the word serves as a playful counterpoint to its stylistic inspirations –think Depeche Mode, New Musik, Pet Shop Boys– and their associations in the cultural memory with the purported glitz and glam of the Reagan-Thatcher years. While glossy and almost impossibly catchy, this is pop music of the wage, not the salary.
The album unfolds cinematically, like a series of vignettes; images, moods and characters conjured with cool economy, scenes of worldly skepticism and cautious romanticism. Opening single “Generic Actress” provides a kind of thesis statement (“Well a job’s what you make it, and nothing’s for free”) and describes the bargain that Los Angeles has offered to so many – “Would you take this endless weekend, or a dreary Monday afternoon?” It takes only the first two lines for “It’s So Obvious” to produce an indelible metaphor – “Was it the way you said my name / That felt like walking away?” On pithy, guitar soaked third single “Heatwave,” an indirectly sketched but immediately recognizable subject is “armed with all the charm of an only son.” The narrator of “Acquaintances” captures the alienating churn of loose bonds: “Unembarrassed / Unemployed / What’s the point / I’m not the person that you want me to be / This conversation feels lonely.” With the plaintive “Camouflage,” inspired by an easy-listening reggae mixtape made by labelmate Better Person, the album departs into a dubby fog, looking back on what has been lost, searching for what still might be found – “There’s nothing to share / Or to do / The parts rearranged / The play has been staged / Where are you?”
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