Behind an unassuming door covered in graffiti art and a vintage elevator with its own doorman is Manhattan’s Flux Studio, where NYC/Berlin-based synth artist and producer Parlour Magic (aka Luc Bokor-Smith) has spent the past year recording his upcoming album The Embassy, set to release on June 5th, 2026.
The studio sports his name lit up on the walls and a corgi whose studio bed and toy pile alone would cost a sizable amount of rent in the New York housing market. “[My dog] is always here, he’s the only one who’s heard [the album] as much as I have.”
Smith and his team invited EARMILK to Flux Studios to hear the full album for the first time and talk with Smith about the year of its making.
The Embassy first started to take shape on a two-week trip to China in 2025. The purpose of the trip was to “get lost,” explore with no pressure or destination.
Smith said, “It was an amazing trip; it changed my life. That trip was the seed of the album.” Smith's time in China also resulted in the first song written for the album, although it wouldn’t make the final cut. “You can have a song that serves a bigger purpose than the song itself,” Smith said about the initial track. “It allowed me to build the album around it. That was the beginning of the process.”
Smith said having a song get cut from the album was unusual for him, saying, “When I’m writing a song, I know exactly where it sits on the album. The track listing always reveals itself to me.”
Throughout the year after this first song’s creation, Smith would travel between Berlin and New York to record the album’s official eleven tracks. Smith roughly divides the album into two sections, with the first half being recorded in Berlin at Funkhaus and the second half recorded at Flux in New York. This has a subtle but powerful effect on the tracks themselves, creating a slightly different sound between the two settings. Berlin is funky, covering deeper messages with sounds that make you move.
The album’s first full-length track, “Operator,” introduces the album’s recurring imagery of communication and miscommunication, but sets it scene with the line “It’s 9 AM in Berlin.”
“Every song has a reference to fractured communication,” Smith said, pointing out “Dial Tone,” the first song Smith wrote for the final line-up of the record, and ended up in its sixth spot. “Dial Tone” was written to illustrate the feeling of “trying to make a call and not getting through…just being like ‘wow, I’m alone.’” Conversely, the album’s final track, “Mir,” ends with a cheeky “goodbye,” using the muffled payphone vocal sound one last time. Smith introduced the sound in the album’s single, “Embassy.”
If there’s one thing Smith can do with this album, it's create a story that keeps coming back. “Embassy,” “Dial Tone,” and “Mir” inarguably exist in the same world; using often subtle features to unite them all into a larger story.
Throughout the process of making The Embassy, Smith also began working with several other artists to create the album, a priority he says he didn’t necessarily have with his previous work. During his last tour, he played with a live band instead of playing by himself from a keyboard or panel. He became attracted to the more collaborative, looser sound that provided, and kept it as a sonic vision for The Embassy. “Eight to ten people touched every song,” he said. “[It was] a hands-on process from start to finish.” He later described some of the people he worked with, like fellow producers Bailey Kislak and Fab Dupont, saying “everyone understood the mission.”
The album’s collaborative nature is evident in all of its eleven tracks. “Arizona, 2000” includes a string section, a feature which, according to Smith, “opened up a dangerous window for me. That’s something I want to explore more.” And the album includes several additional vocalists, like a whole choir appearing on “Mir,” amping up the track onto a whole other level. Whether it be a person, a place, or the Kyoto Climate Conference (“1997”), each track has specific influences that lend to its distinctive sound.
While the album’s music doesn’t draw heavily on Smith’s time in China, there are several nods to these travels, most notably the use of audio from Chinese radio, which Smith recorded for hours and interspersed throughout the tracks.
There seems to be a trend of placing calm sounds in expansive spaces, like shooting album covers and music videos outdoors, or packing a big sound into a very small space, such as singing about heartbreak from a bedroom. The Embassy, however, is defined by transitions and movement. From promotional photos of Smith walking through hallways and leaning on frosted doors to the album’s sonic and literal shifts between cultures, motion is at the heart of the work.
He agreed, explaing, “Often when I’m working on a record, I’ll think about ‘what space does this song have?’ I kept coming back to this picture,” he said. He then pointed to the picture that appears on the front of the album. It’s not one that was taken by Smith or his team; it’s a photo by Canadian photographer Greg Girard. It’s a photo of Japan by a Canadian photographer, used to encapsulate a record that uses the sounds of New York with inspirations from Berlin and China. And it all comes together to represent one singular artist and his vision.
Parlour Magic's new album The Embassy will be released everywhere on June 5th.
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