When Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote saw Beck at a bar in LA they didn’t play it cool. “We went up to him and said, ‘Hey! We have a band and you should listen!'” That band is Hinds, formed in 2011 in Madrid, Spain.
The California run-in is not where the Beck story ends. The next day, the two wrote the song, “Boom Boom Back.” “We knew it was a banger,” Cosials (“CC”) tells me with confidence. Amazingly, the day after that they saw Beck again. Reeling from the last encounter and the song they just wrote, they pulled out a phone and played the demo for him on the spot. He liked it. “Then, we just felt like…you only live once and we only have one shot. We said, ‘Actually it fits with you. You should sing on it.” And he did. That is how Beck came to feature on Hinds song “Boom Boom Back.” They asked and he agreed.
Hinds carry that spirit of carefree confidence in their new album, VIVA HINDS, our Record of the Week on WNXP and a record that takes fun seriously.
The Purists vs. The Interpolers in Spain
Justin Barney: What was the scene like in Madrid when you started up?
Ana Perote: The scene where we started in Madrid was trying to imitate and replicate American bands.
Carlota Cosials: There were two clear sides. The first people I met were people who admired The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Rolling Stones. And all the friends we started to have called them “The Purists.” And the Purists called the other guys “The Interpolers.” The people who listened to Interpol.
So we came from the old guys, from The Purists, and we had a lot of friends there, but we ended up going with the people who listened to the music that was alive.
AP: I remember the first time we heard Mac Demarco and how shocked we were. And there was a big batch of garage rock bands like The Black Lips and everyone in Madrid, in our very tiny scene were trying to imitate them.
On Grian Chatten from Fontaines D.C.
JB: How did Grian Chatten end up on the album?
AP: We’ve actually been friends for a very long time. The first time we played Dublin they opened for us. We started clashing again like two summers ago when festivals came back and we started sending him songs. When we finished a version of the album we sent it to him and we actually use what he said about it when we are pitching the album or talking to a journalist.
JB: What was it?
CC: Do you want me to tell you? Hold on, let me find the text. Okay, this is it:
I just listened to it on the Eurostar from Paris to London. Mind blowing. In terms of variety, wit, lyrics, and arrangements. The production is AMAZING. I feel like parts of it are overwhelmingly emotional in exactly the same way I find you as people. Exquisitely emotional and defiant. Like when you sit with someone for a pint and accidentally understand the world together and you know that when you get up the understanding will leave you, but it’s okay. It’s beautiful that you had that effect on each other. It’s that reason that it really feels like the right album to be called VIVA HINDS. I’m so impressed and so so proud of you.
A text from Grian Chatten from Fontaines DC
CC: He should be a poet. I hope one day he has the chance.
On having fun
AP: On this album we let ourselves make less sense because we realize that so many concepts are transcendent to the actual words. And you can feel a vibe even if the word doesn’t exist, like “boom boom back.”
CC: I think being playful can get confused with being respected. I understand that people crave respect and want to be admired, but for us, I think we never took ourselves too seriously.
AP: In the past humor has always been very important to us, but now the most important thing is work. And then humor and being sarcastic and realizing that this is going to be a crazy ride and we better have fun on it otherwise we are going to be miserable.
CC: On this album we wanted two things. One was to be called a rock band. That is why we did this album with only four instruments and played everything live. The second thing was to be serious and to be taken seriously.
AP: We could talk about this forever. A lot of it comes from being young girls that were doing punk and learning how to play our instruments on stage and having to watch YouTube videos of everything we were doing and all of that.
CC: But we are over that complex now. I’m just a girl.
AP: And girls just wanna have fun, mother fucker.