Parlour Magic Brings Vintage Synthpop to Life

Luc Bokor-Smith never thought he’d sing on stage. He’s a producer. And he’s good at it. Yet he just finished a five-show, co-headline tour with Late Again and has a gig at Baby’s All Right in Brooklyn, New York, next month.

But maybe it’s not Bokor-Smith performing at all.

He releases music under the name Parlour Magic, a self-described “project” from the Manhattan native.

The project inspires storytelling across various media — the music takes precedent, Bokor-Smith says, but aesthetics matter, too.

“I don't think you can have the music without the visuals, and vice-versa.”

The Parlour Magic project in its current form seems to evoke a bygone age of disco balls and velvet steeped in a liminal dreamscape.

When recording his second studio album, Saturn Return, last year, Bokor-Smith would film the studio sessions on an old Sony camera.

“You have this weird timelessness ... the footage was us on computers, but through this thick filter of nostalgia,” Luc says.

The footage inspired the album’s ostensibly 70s visuals. Take the album cover: Photographed by Hannah Wyatt, it shows Bokor-Smith sitting in a director’s chair in a hazy room as a vintage camera projects light onto a wall.

The studio footage also had the “analog warmth” he tries to capture with his vintage synths in the studio.

Yes — the music equipment is retro, too. His synths, with few exceptions, are “almost entirely vintage analog synths from the 70s and 80s.”

Using the vintage synths “affords you this warmth” that can’t be authentically replicated, Bokor-Smith says. “There's an authenticity to actually using the real gear.”

Parlour Magic’s tagline is no lie: “VINTAGE SYNTHPOP FROM NYC.”

In Parlour Magic’s music, you can hear the melodic influence of the early 2000s indie-rock bands Bokor-Smith grew up on: The Strokes, the Arctic Monkeys, the Killers. Depeche Mode is also an inspiration.

Another source of inspiration is his collaborators: Fab Dupont and Luca Chesney. Both have a writing credit on the March 2025 single “Queens,” which is part of the Saturn Return universe but was left off the album.

This is a sharp pivot from Parlour Magic’s 2020 album, The Fluid Neon Origami Trick, which Bokor-Smith independently wrote and produced.

He calls Chesney “an old friend” who “more than almost anyone in the world understands what I'm going for with the Parlor Magic project.” On Dupont: “'Queens' wouldn't have been the same without him.” This is Dupont’s first Parlour Magic writing credit.

In a live environment, the songs have taken on a new life, Bokor-Smith says. He plays live alongside brothers Erez and Oren Levin.

“When you get on a stage and perform [the songs] you realize there are elements that work and don't work in the live context. As you iterate, show after show, the songs become a slightly different thing,” Bokor-Smith says.

The music is mixed and mastered before it’s brought to Erez and Oren. From there, the brothers, alongside Bokor-Smith, decide how the music will be played live.

“There's the three of us in a room and we figure out which of the 17 different keyboard parts is going to make the most sense for Oren to play live?”

With the tightness of the trio, it’s reasonable to think that Erez and Oren will be brought into the music-making process, Bokor-Smith says.

That new music will continue to evolve the Parlour Magic project.

“I'm at a place now, musically, where I almost feel like I owe to myself to kind of go deeper,” Bokor-Smith says.