With VIVA HINDS, Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote have overcome a domino effect of bad fortune to rally for their fourth album together as Hinds. After the release of the Spanish band’s third album, The Prettiest Curse in 2020, the four-piece split with their management team, canceled all their touring arrangements during the pandemic, found themselves without a label, and then—to really test their mettle—their bassist and drummer both dropped out of the band.
Under conditions that might have led any other bands to crumble or desperately recruit last-minute replacements, the Madrid-based Perrote and Cosials reaffirmed their shared faith in friendship, enabling themselves to find the musical language to express the vibrant, witty spirit of Hinds that even the loss of half of the band couldn’t diminish. Perrote and Cosias share guitar and bass duties, while long-time friend and founding member of the Vaccines (and producer for beabadoobee), Pete Robertson, provides the reliably buoyant drums (and production expertise).
Guest features from Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten and Beck fit in perfectly with the party atmosphere of VIVA HINDS, and their brief but energetic collaborations don’t draw the spotlight away from Perrote and Cosials’s songwriting flair. Fans of the band’s 2016 debut album Leave Me Alone and sophomore effort I Don’t Run in 2018 will hear that signature Hinds they’re accustomed to: sweet harmonies, indie-pop jaunty guitar fuzz and a reckless, wry sense of candid humor.
The chunky, stompy guitar that thunders out of the gates on opening track “Hi, How Are You” is a wake-up call that the band is not languishing in melancholy after four years of crappy ill fortune. With a nod to the duality of tragedy and comedy, the duo sing “Remember one day, I’ll be gone / And I know you know I’m wrong / But lemme shine, shine shine / One last time ‘til I go numb.” In contrast, the gentler, lushly, atmospheric shoegaze anthem of “The Bed, The Room, The Rain and You” is an ode to the grief of a freshly broken relationship. “The bed is you, the room is you, the rain is you, the blackbirds too,” Cosials and Perrote lament in harmony. This inevitably leads to a plea: “Let me know where I can find you, el sol y tú, la luna y tú, let me know where I can find you.” It’s sweet and sad in equal measure, and immersed in fuzzy, intertwined guitars that hark to the Cure’s “Boys Don’t Cry” in the most alluring way.
That 1980s indie-pop/new wave mood colors “Stranger” too, with its echoey, melodic atmospheric guitars. Perrote’s breathy, hyper-feminine vocals are met with a significantly softer side to Chatten than recent Fontaines D.C. tracks have showcased. More contrast would have strengthened the track, however. The gentleness and dulled-down deliveries give no dynamism to the arrangement, and with more oomph, it could have been the Chatten-Hinds version of Lee Hazlewood and Nancy Sinatra’s “Some Velvet Morning.”
Tracks like “Superstar” and “On My Own” are humdrum, following a formulaic pop-punk recipe that might work for 1990s MTV background music, but they lack the sort of punch Hinds are more than capable of. “En Forma” is a playful, energetic triumph delivered entirely in Spanish, while “Coffee” is a strummed, sardonic sucker-punch full of bad girl one-liners (“I like black coffee and cigarettes / And flowers from boys that I’m not sleeping with / And pulling you strong from that chain that’s on your neck”). The droning, reverb-rich guitar swirls with dizzying joy as Perrote and Cosials coo, “baby, stop calling, stop calling.”
VIVA HINDS is sexy, sarcastic, charming and silly at times, and it’s an album always unafraid of lament and languish. Rather than stick to a strict concept or theme, Hinds have done what they do best, and have always done best: They write songs about love and loss, with just the right punch of melodic, jangly guitar to give edge to that sticky sweetness.
Read our recent Digital Cover Story on Hinds here.
