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The 2020s have been hard for, well, nearly every sentient being on Earth. But for Hinds, the last four years saw the band lose members, managers, a label, and—thanks to the pandemic—the ability to play live. It’s all enough to make many folks quit. But as Hinds’ Ana García Perrote puts it, if she and bandmate/friend Carlotta Cosials ever even considered such a thing, “it lasted seconds.”
Instead, the duo fought through it all and are now shouting that Hinds is still very much alive with their accurately titled new album, VIVA HINDS. Their new songs are equally declarative, from the tone-setting opener “Hi, How Are You”—where the duo trades lines like “Hey, you OK?” / “I’ve been better, tbh”—to a slow-burn-to-explosion clapback “Superstar,” to the album’s climactic rocker, “En Forma”—featuring “Mirame no puedo mas!” as THE call-and-response for every overburdened modern woman. It all feels both intimate and anthemic, as raw, emotional lyrics are backed with the most lush and full sound of Hinds’ career.
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Talking on Zoom with Cosials and Perrote—both from their apartments in Madrid, both searching for ways to combat the heat that wouldn’t create Zoom-interfering noise—it’s clear that all of this stemmed from one very immediate goal. “Survival. This album, for us, has been about surviving… as a band, as people, as musicians, as friends,” says Perrote. And because of this, “The whole thing was a success on its own, even before releasing it… because we didn’t know if it was going to be released.” Cosials elaborates how the album felt like a child: “We didn’t know when we were doing it, but it was an album that was going to save us. I feel like the album knew that it was going to do that, but we didn’t. It’s this reciprocal love, like, ‘I take care of you because you’re actually creating me.’”
The silver lining to the last few years’ exoduses is that now the duo have felt free to experiment. The lo-fi garage charm of their prior albums remains intact, but it’s augmented with a wider palette. Like lead single “Boom Boom Back” is an indie-pop bop (featuring OG bop-maker Beck); “Stranger” has sharp, New Wave-ish guitars; and Perrote and Cosials create their take on shoegaze with the ethereal “The Bed, The Rain, The Room, and You.” This last one, Cosials explains, is “a song that was born in London, on a rainy day…one of those days where it feels kind of like sometimes you cannot distinguish if missing someone makes you happy or makes you sad.” To capture that mix of joyful nostalgia and heartache, friend and occasional co-writer Sean Silverman introduced the duo to some new guitar tones, and the experience has Cosials feeling that “there are two very nice, different worlds of guitars that we can follow from now on.”
The most startling departure, though, is hearing this Spanish band sing fully in Spanish. While they’ve always sprinkled in lyrics from their native tongue, the songs “En Forma” and “Mala Vista” are their first entirely in Spanish. It’s an unintentional songwriting evolution, though. “It’s weird ’cause obviously when we first started singing in English, that was never a decision that we thought of,” Perrote says. “But now, it’s like, us being aware of it and growing up to see [singing in Spanish] is a bit like a superpower.’”
Opening this door also allowed Perrote to write without censoring herself: “Songs, you can’t really translate them. How they sound, how your voice sounds in different languages, it’s very different. You can’t really plan it. If you try to, it’s gonna be shit. But sometimes, you just start a song in Spanish and realize there’s no way you could sing it in English.” Cosials adds that, with “Mala Vista,” “We’ve been wanting to do this game of vocals, of repeating whatever the other one is saying, like rhymes that remind us of songs from when we were kids. Maybe it sounded better to us in Spanish because when we were kids, we wouldn’t be speaking in English that much.”
While it sounds triumphant now, the album’s title originates from a different dark time in Hinds’ past. At the beginning of their career, the duo was forced to change their original name—the Deers—under threat of lawsuit from the Canadian band the Dears. But this bummer inspired sweetness, as Cosials tells, “At shows, the fans, to cheer us up and give us confidence in our own new name, they started screaming ‘Viva Hinds!’” It’s a mantra that lives on in their daily lives, as whenever fans spot them on the streets of Madrid, “instead of saying, ‘Hey, you’re the one from Hinds’ or something like that, they scream, ‘Viva Hinds!’” Perrote laughs and adds, “It’s amazing. And it’s easy to communicate. It’s like ‘Viva Hinds!’ and you reply ‘Viva!’”
This fall, Hinds and their fans will be reunited as the band gets back on the road at last. Not a moment too soon, Cosials says: “I’m a little bit hungry for adventures. Like, I can’t wait to go back to touring and to be loading in and loading out amps and being exhausted and meeting people and being in new places and all the stuff.” The tour kicks off in October, but based on the gigs they’ve played so far this year—15 shows in one week at SXSW alone!—Perrote is feeling better than ever. “I think because we’ve missed so much the feeling, we’re giving the best live shows we’ve ever given,” she says, “And the new girls, Paula [Ruiz, new bassist] and [Maria Lázaro, new drummer], they’re so incredibly talented. It’s one of those things where you’re so scared of change because, you know, change is scary, but then suddenly you realize it’s for the best and it’s just amazing.”
So now that Hinds has achieved their goal of “survival,” what’s next? Cosials would rather not think about it, as, “It doesn’t really matter what you say because, even if we do well or if we do bad, we’re still gonna be making music.” Even after everything, Perrote maintains a similar chill optimism, saying, “I’m already fucking proud. I don’t know how many girl bands there are that have survived this many years or that have released four studio albums. I don’t think historically this is a small thing. We used to say, ‘I wanna still be playing music with my friends.’ And we are doing exactly what we dreamed of. And it’s very beautiful that we still dream about the same thing.”
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