Perusing with Perfect Outfit at EVA B IN MONTREAL, QC
Photo credit: Madeline Lines
Weaving through thrift store racks, BILLY RILEY OF RIBBON SKIRT AND I talk ABOUT late blooming and becoming, fresh off his debut solo EP WALKING HOME.
I’m in the corner of Eva B amidst a jungle of clothes with Billy Riley, aka Perfect Outfit. It’s a Montreal thrift store that feels like a fever dream. Its contents are always changing places, the face of it shapeshifting every time you look away. It’s a fitting place to have a conversation about how some things change and some stay the same.
Nothing is ever in the same place here, but the store itself is a weirdly comforting fixture on Saint Laurent. It’s a fond old haunt transplants like us often remember from early days. I swear I went to a rave in the attic after they shuttered that part, Billy swears there used to be a pit of clothes in a pool you could lay on and watch movies from.
We bite into $1 cookies with fat chocolate chips that still taste the same, hunched over teas puffing out steam, talking about what it means to make something on your own. Talking about what it means to start to make out your own voice over the sound of everyday life’s hum.
It’s been a big ride lately for Riley’s other project, Ribbon Skirt. Getting nominated for a Polaris Prize, touring around the world and getting dizzy with festival circuits, picking up buzz. The momentum of it all has propelled him closer towards himself – both in their role in the band, but also in this new project.
“I started playing when I was 13 or 14, when the cool kids did battle of the bands,” Riley remembers. “I chose bass first because I just thought someone might need a bassist.”
Perfect Outfit might be the first time Riley has approached a project with less of a filling-someone-else’s-need mindset. Instead, he’s imagining what he would make if it were entirely up to him, filling his own need. I first caught a glimpse of this in the basement venue P’tit Ours a couple months ago, Riley pacing back and forth in a frenetic rhythm and an awesome skirt. It was magic, and the genuineness was felt.
“I was always kind of intimidated by making music on my own, and having that strength of conviction in my own ideas,” says Riley. But with the confidence boost and clarity of Ribbon Skirt, that has been falling away. So have Riley’s ideas of what he can and can’t do, what kind of person (or musician) he is, or is not.
It was also catalyzed by seeing other artists who stripped away the mystique of making electronic music, particularly a memorable deBasement show. Riley remembers them as, “incredibly themselves, singular, but also achievable.” Riley is freshly in the business of being incredibly himself, too, and it shows.
Walking Home captures this moment. The new EP is danceable, it’s a self-proclaimed “tone-deaf Pet Shop Boys,” it’s a soundtrack of racing thoughts. It’s kind of what it sounds like inside your head on a night you forced yourself to go out dancing mid-anxiety spiral, and you haven’t quite danced yourself clean yet, but you’re getting there.
Photo credit: Madeline Lines - Billy Riley @ Eva B
The sound reverberates, glassy and tinny, Riley jabbing out lines matter-of-fact and sharp. Taking cues from British post-punk band the Fall, there’s also a distinctly raw Montreal sound with echoes of HRT, local hardcore transgirl duo. (They’re actually gracing the stage with Riley for the upcoming release show on November 6).
The lamp on the piano next to us gets yanked off. They’re vacuuming the shop. Shit, we realize we talked and talked and didn’t have time to thrift for the “perfect outfit” yet. It’s kind of the worst store to only have 10 minutes to shop in. We run around, grabbing at items, doing the kind of photoshoot you do as a teenager with your allowance spent and no intention of actually buying something.
Billy grabs a camo jacket, and we bump into our pal Marlaena Moore in a far corner of the floor as we do our speedy lap. Voice of an angel, theatre visionary, and part-time employee sorting through the masses of clothes that come in to Eva B. “Good luck with the move,” Riley wishes, as we scoot out the door.
Across the street, a chaotic touristy t-shirt shop has its doors wide open. It’s raining, so we might as well. Squeezing in, it’s floor-to-ceiling corny band tees and dusty sunglasses and a really pushy owner who we later realized was passive-aggressively trying to tell us they were closing.
I ask Riley what his prized band tee was growing up. Riley says he used to be obsessed with Graham Coxon, the guitarist from Blur. “I had a really unflattering lime green t-shirt of his. Then I ran into him in a guitar store in London, wearing the shirt, and I had to hide it.”
We’re peeling up St Lau in the rain now, neither of us with umbrellas nor perfect outfits in tow, but bonding over the movie Grey Gardens. Riley’s moniker comes from a misremembered line that became part of their lexicon.
“Me and my partner Annie would always quote it if we saw someone wearing a cool or crazy outfit, or just didn’t give a fuck about what they were wearing,” Riley says. “Perfect outfit for the day!”
It makes sense that Little Edie, documentary queen of marching to the beat of her own drum, would be a muse for this project that is a study of what it means to become religiously oneself.
As he’s expanded his sense of self, what he can make and what he sounds like, Riley’s also expanded his wardrobe and how he can dress, too. He’s shaking off the rigid gender roles he grew up with in England.
We keep walking uphill, dodging fire hydrants and continuing our conversation about how many versions of ourselves we get to meet in one lifetime. That’s the thing about music, too – sit on something for too long wringing your hands over if its “good,” and it starts to stale and depart from being relevant to you and your life now.
You have to nab that feeling like a slippery fish in your hands, digging your fingers in, and Riley has finally done it. Walking Home is a testament to being brave and becoming yourself. Recording it, sending it out.
“It’s about recognizing how much I've changed, how much I've grown,” says Riley. “And not giving myself too much of a hard time for how long that took.”
Perfect Outfit will be playing live at La Sotterena in Montreal, QC on November 6, 2026 with HRT and Bad Faith Actor. Find tickets here.