I am incredibly honoured to present to you lot, my lovely readership, the exclusive premiere of Pastel Blank’s latest single, ‘Shareholder’.
Pastel Blank is the Montréal-based art-rock project led by singer and songwriter Angus Watt. Known for their genre-bending sounds and incisive lyricism, the band has drawn comparisons to the likes of Pavement and Talking Heads.
‘Shareholder’ is the first single from Watt’s upcoming album, Unmade in Minutes, out April 24.
Watch the video below, and scroll down to read our ’10 Questions With…’ Pastel Blank!
10 Questions With Pastel Blank
How would you describe the sound of Pastel Blank?
Angular, funky, nervous, joyful, oblique, tongue-in-cheek.
What are your biggest non-music influences?
Cartoonists: Gary Larson, Phil Elverum (Fancy People Comics is incredible), Bill Watterson
Writers: Flannery O’Connor, David Berman, George Saunders, Anton Chekhov, Kurt Vonnegut, Larry Brown (his story of becoming a writer is particularly inspiring)
IMO, I think short stories are a great parallel to songwriting. They’re both forms which work with limited space to create a feeling/s and get you to care about what’s happening within the first few moments.
Films / Television: After Hours, Monkey Shines, The Big Lebowski, HBO’s Girls, Community, Arrested Development.
If you had to cover any song and put a Pastel Blank spin on it, which would you choose?
Recently, we’ve been playing a no-wave cover of ‘Blister In The Sun’ by Violent Femmes in the style of DEVO covering ‘Satisfaction’ by the Rolling Stones.
What is your earliest memory of music?
My parents had a CD of In A Silent Way by Miles Davis that they played all the time, so that album is burned into my memory.
What does 2026 have in store for Pastel Blank?
We’ll be touring western Canada in the summer, playing some festivals in Ontario and Quebec, and hopefully making it across the pond at some point. The Montréal crew has been writing as a group, which is kind of new to me and quite exciting, so I’m sure we’ll be getting into the studio sooner than later.
For the cover art of ‘Shareholder’, you’re perched like a bird on a money tree. What inspired this?
Jocasta, who designed it, and I talked about different 3D modeled scenes that might work, and a money tree felt very fitting. There’s an alternate version of the cover where I’m falling out of the money tree, which also feels in line with the theme of the song.
The music video for ‘Shareholder’ is wonderfully wacky, although the subject matter is quite serious. How do you balance writing about important issues without compromising your sound and style?
I didn’t really think too much about tailoring the sound to the subject, but when it came to writing the lyrics I did want to feel like I was getting parts of the story “right”, or as right as I could. The tongue-in-cheek, wacky style of the song could make it seem like it’s all a big joke, but I do think that you can use un-serious forms to communicate more serious ideas. I read “Empire of Pain” by Patrick Radden Keefe, which is a fantastic piece of narrative journalism that was quite helpful for cross-referencing some of the lyrics.
Your music videos see you dressing up in a lot of costumes. Do you have an outfit/costume in particular you’ve got your eyes on for a future video?
I’m intrigued by a two-person horse costume.
The album cut of ‘Shareholder’ has an extended introduction, and a smoky one at that. If you had to film a video segment for this, what would it be?
I could picture a bird’s-eye shot of someone swimming in a ball-pit of pills. I really love these two scenes in The Big Lebowski: The one with ‘The Man In Me’, where the Dude is flying over the city, and then the insane psychedelic bowling dream sequence with ‘Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)’. It’d be fun to reference those somehow.
Who is your Pale White Prince?
It’s sort of a collage of a few different people, from a group of friends I used to hang with back in Victoria. Lots of dreams, not much follow-through. But it’s also poking fun at myself a bit too, because you inevitably become the product of who you spend your time with.
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