Flashion Backward: The Stills

Welcome back to Flashion Backward, a new UI feature that’s the spiritual cousin of our recently debuted Flashion Forward. Here, we rifle through our treasure trove of interviews to fish out a vintage gem–the better to explore the strange vortex in which fashion and musicians meet. Onto this week’s kickass score…

Post-post-punkers and former Montreal art students The Stills have been blithely living the rock ‘n’ roll dream since 2003, walking the thinner and thinner line between cheesing out and keeping it real. They’ve appeared on the (99% cool) soundtrack for the (49% cool) cinematic tour de farce Wicker Park, opened for the likes of Oldey McMoldy (but still 51% cool) Paul McCartney and (89% cool) Kings of Leon and played with the 210% cool Yeah Yeah Yeahs.

Four albums later, they’re churning out at one moment experimental, the next stadium-worthy rootsy rock that seems sweet but has a bitter bite, like a marshmallow peep followed by a double shot of bourbon. The band members look like the Bowery circa 1998, when the grit still eclipsed the glam, but it was starting to smell suspiciously pretty. Their trippy aesthetic reflects their sound and their aspect – some weird amalgamation of a pouting Marcel Duchamp with a generous (and ironically applied, natch) dollop of Bob Ross.

Here, they describe what would happen if they were allowed to design their own album covers, which, for everyone’s sake, their label, Arts & Crafts, should look into STAT: they essentially envision white cats on stairs hopped up on steroids with toilet paper flowing all around them; on the magically animated cover, the felines would frolic joyfully about for our bemusement. LOLcats!!