What Makes Pastel Blank Tick
Angus Watt reveals what lies beneath the shiny surface of his music project, Pastel Blank.
By Reilly Tuesday
Photos by Kenza Vandenbroeck, Styling by Tamara Fleming
- Published on
“What Pastel Blank can offer is a moment to dance, to just feel a bit of catharsis, hopefully. A moment to feel unburdened,” Watt says. Through layers of pop tendencies and angular experimentation, Pastel Blank blends artful post-punk with quirky funk into a collage of tension and release, neurosis and joy. The sheen reflects at times off shiny packaging, at others off fun-house mirrors—but it almost always makes you want to move.
Born out of the ashes of another band in Watt’s hometown of Victoria, Pastel Blank began as a “quasi-solo project that’s not-really-a-solo-project.” Over time, it has taken shape through shifting lineups, collaborators, and close friends. For Unmade in Minutes, the current lineup includes Montreal-based musicians Ethan Soil, Rachel Silverstein, Isaac Seglins, Jameson Daniel, and Brennan Doyle, all of whom help define the band’s sound through their work across projects like Nora Kelly Band, Fleece, hooper, Meggo, Bloomfield Family Band, and more.
The genre-bending nature of Pastel Blank creates a sense of chaos—but it’s controlled: sharp, calculated, never messy. The more off-kilter moments often come from writing alone—an isolated process of stacking layers “in a very janky way.” Writing with others, on the other hand, brings momentum that keeps the music moving forward and rounds out the sound. “It’s kind of cool seeing where we all align in music taste, where we have gaps in each other’s taste, and then where we fill those gaps for each other. I really love seeing what people bring to the project in terms of their own style.”
Still, the impact of Watt’s own taste is undeniable within the sound of Pastel Blank. There’s a clear love for wacky, experimental guitar music, with Talking Heads as a reference point and the interlocking guitar parts of Women cited as a major influence. But there’s also a deep reverence for pop, with “Dancing Queen” held up as a perfect song. There’s such a high standard in the pop world, Watt explains—one he isn’t trying to achieve, but deeply respects for its ability to make something addictively good, almost as if created in a lab. It’s fun to set that standard, then see what kind of weirdness slips in.
A similar approach carries into the lyrics. Beneath the band’s upbeat, danceable sound, darker themes are often tucked away. “Again, pop-y and upbeat dance sounds are a good vehicle to ask, okay, what can I sneak in?” he says. On the cover of Unmade in Minutes, designed by Jocasta Clarke and inspired by the glossy maximalism of ’80s magazines, the band’s gleaming aesthetic is reflected in the glistening surface of a plastic stopwatch.
Speaking about the album, Watt says that one of its big themes is “the handing over of our neurological control board to quick pleasures, and the loss of control that comes with that.” With tongue-in-cheek sensibilities, he uses humour to touch on topics like nicotine addiction and doomscrolling in search of dopamine, or to critique major events symptomatic of consumer-driven times, like the opioid crisis. In Pastel Blank’s sound, the unexpected becomes a constant—but in the lyrics, there’s a lingering question of whether the cycle ever really breaks.
There is, at least, a way through it. The answer to Why am I doing this? is the very motion-packed music used to ask it. “It’s good to get out of your head and into your body, and I know that music has done that for me many, many times. It’s pretty therapeutic in that way,” he says.
We may be trapped within time’s relentless circuit, but it’s not so bad when it’s filled with joy. That’s something Watt finds through playing with Pastel Blank—or the six to eight other bands its members are part of. Once on stage, that joy takes over, lingering even through loadout, which says a lot, he laughs.
He jokes that someday, with all the bands between them, there might even be a massive megaband show with 20 people on stage. It’s easy to imagine the joy carrying through that loadout too.
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