Photo courtesy Dario Vazquez
Hinds are the Spanish indie rock band that could. Originally formed in 2011 as a duo under the name Deers, they were quickly forced to change their name under legal threat from another, similarly-named band. They expanded into a quartet, but have faced other challenges. In 2020, they struggled through the financial hit of being unable to tour their third album The Prettiest Curse, and have since been sent further reeling by changes in management and record labels. Perhaps the most significant challenge Hinds has faced so far is the abrupt departure of bassist Ade Martin and drummer Amber Grimbergen in late 2022. Now back to their roots as a creative duo, singer/guitarists Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote are taking things in stride and taking control. In September of this year they released their fourth album, VIVA HINDS, a victorious statement to let the world know that Hinds isn’t going away anytime soon.
Hinds are taking their international tour from Mexico, across the US, through Europe, and eventually over to Japan. Most importantly however, they’ll be stopping in Boston for a show at Brighton Music Hall on October 28. We caught up with Ana Perrote in a video call on October 11, on her last day in Los Angeles before beginning the US leg of the tour.
Note: Some questions and answers have been slightly edited for brevity and clarity.
Ana Perrote: How are you doing?
Allston Pudding: Good! How are you? Busy?
Perrote: I’m good! Not too much. We’re in LA. We don’t have a show today so I can’t say we’re busy, but at the same time I broke my foot two days ago, which keeps me busy. Going to the bathroom feels like a chore and keeps me busy. [she laughs] But not too bad.
AP: Well I appreciate you taking time on your day off from shows to talk to me.
P: My pleasure.
AP: So the last time I saw you was back in 2022 when you played Boston Calling Music Festival…
P: Oh you were there!
AP: Yeah I was there! I made a point of going to see Hinds, actually. But you have been through some changes in the meantime. You’ve changed labels, management… you’ve lost half your band, but it seems like it’s kind of part of Hinds’ identity to deal with change pretty well.
P: I love that you’re saying that.
AP: I think you’ve managed to adapt really well to everything that’s thrown your way. You’ve maintained this positive attitude and playfulness that really doesn’t show how much you’ve been through. How do you keep that positive attitude throughout all the challenges you deal with?
P: To be honest? Right now it’s super easy for me to stay positive. ‘Cause like we were so close to not be able to carry on as a band, and not be able to do what we love the most–which is Hinds–that right now even with a fucking broken foot… I feel I’d rather be here with a broken foot in LA playing shows than be in any day of the last three years.
AP: Wait, so how did you break your foot, actually?
P: Oh my god. I almost don’t wanna tell you because it’s so not rock and roll and so not fucking fun. I was walking! Walking in the streets of Mexico City. To be fair–and to give me some credit, everyone who has been in Mexico can prove this–all of the pavement is kind of like, broken, it’s very uneven. But still! How fucking lame! Like, you know, every fucking night I would play shows I put CC up on my shoulders and we do a solo on it, I jump, I crowd surf, I walk up in the fences, I do all of this crazy shit on stage but none of that broke my foot, but it was walking to the hotel. It was three minutes away from the hotel, the day before the first show.
AP: That’s brutal. Have you come up with a good rock and roll cover story though?
P: No! No, no because everyone knows that it was before the day of the show! I mean the closest thing I’m starting to say–I’m joking about it but I might stop joking and pretend it’s real–we went to the–do you know the Lucha Libre? The fights they have in Mexico–the fake fights–I don’t know how you call them in the US. Me and CC, obviously, we went there and because we love doing stupid shit in our shows, and doing flips and whatever we can. We were thinking: hey! We should do something related to that, like a Lucha Libre kind of thing in Mexico. Which obviously we couldn’t, but maybe I can say that it was fighting in the Lucha Libre Mexico show.
AP: Absolutely. That is a great cover story.
P: Nice.
AP: I was just going through your new album VIVA HINDS and I was saying to myself that despite losing half your band and everything, Hinds still feels very you. The new album, it’s like dripping with Hinds’ personality. I think it’s really extra noticeable as well in all the music videos that you and CC directed. You directed, edited, and starred in all of those videos, right?
P: All of them! And–something we’re not saying because it sounds like we’re smaller than what we want to be–we also produced them! Because we couldn’t afford a producer!
AP: Hey that’s a big deal!
P: It was huge! It was the worst part–I mean the part that took the most work.
AP: It seems like a lot of work, because you did quite a few music videos. Could you tell me anything in general about that? Because it’s super impressive and I think you did an amazing job.
P: Thank you. Thank you so much. It was I think one of the best decisions that we’ve taken in this whole album release, and it was actually not something that we planned, really. I mean VIVA HINDS is such a lesson of “you do what you can with what you have.” Things don’t go as planned, so just try to do the best with the cards that you’re handed. In this specific thing about the music videos, we started with “Coffee” which was the comeback single. And actually we disagreed with our team that “Coffee” had to [be] the first single. Everyone like–well all of our team, it’s just three people in our team but it’s all we need–our management and our label, they were like really pushing for “Coffee,” they said that they had that Hinds energy, that core and blah, blah, blah. Me and CC, we didn’t even see it not only as not the first single, we didn’t even see it as a single at all. We were like “no, this is not–like, there’s so many good songs on the album,” and blah, blah, blah. Now seeing it with a bit of perspective, I see. I think it’s because it’s a song that sounds more similar to what we used to do in the past. Obviously as musicians who want to prove that we’re constantly growing–and we’re so proud of these songs that might be more complicated and stuff–basically we thought it was going to be another song. We were talking with our label and suddenly they convinced us, so we were two weeks before when we had to deliver the music video, and we had just changed the song so we had basically no time, very low budget because we’re on an indie label. Very low budget, no time, but a lot of big dreams for the big comeback. So we were like, “fuck, okay.” We wanted it to be in Madrid because obviously there’s a shoutout to Madrid in the song and stuff, so we were like okay obviously we have to do it ourselves. We have no other option. No one’s going to jump into this with no time, no budget, and in Madrid. So we went ahead. We put in a lot of effort. We tried as hard as we could and suddenly the result was so amazing, and like we felt so proud of it, and we felt like our whole personality as a band was perfect. Obviously I think in Hinds–because this is the fourth album–we’ve had a lot of great videos in the past but we’ve never been like fully happy with all of the videos of one album, you know? And I think it’s because it’s very complicated. Maybe because we’re girls, it makes it even harder. Say like, how our director wants to show us to the world is very different usually to how we perceive ourselves and how we want to show ourselves to the world. So once we saw the results of “Coffee” we were like “fuck, we love it too much, now we’re gonna have to direct everything.” And I say “fuck” because it’s so much fucking work! But it was like, it’s just, it’s so obvious that we have to keep doing these ourselves. And it’s been beautiful to be honest. It’s like we’ve learned so much from that first music video “Coffee,” to lighting, to producing, to shooting in–the one we did in LA–was in film, and then “En Forma” is with the fastest robotic arm camera in the market, so we had to learn to how program!
AP: Yeah I noticed that it feels like it’s got some production value, yeah!
P: Claro! We had to learn how to program as a first director’s thing, like programming, and it’s a camera that moves so fast that it doesn’t even go by seconds, it goes by frames! We had a whole day of writing all of the shot list and blah, blah, blah. We’ve learned so much and really enjoyed it, but to be honest with you, after every music video shoot we both ended up crying when we got home. We just cried of exhaustion because we were loading in all of the gear, like the whole thing is just so much work… but, when we were seeing all of the results we were like “fuck me, yeah like, I’ll do it a million times again.” I’m really, really happy that we did it.
AP: Yeah, I mean–again–really amazing work. It does not show that you were learning on the fly.
P: Thank you so much!
AP: It kind of fits with the like–almost a theme of the album is you taking control.
P: Absolutely. Yeah.
Now that Hinds are a duo, you have more freedom. Is there anything that you do now that you couldn’t do or maybe didn’t want to do before?
P: We don’t mean that in the sense of like we had any kind of censoring or–you know, it wasn’t like the other two girls were telling us like “no, you can’t do that” or something like that. Not at all. Me and CC have always kind of like been in the forefront and in the back too of every creative decision and song and stuff in Hinds, but just not having to check in on everyone and not having to… I don’t want this to be something that goes against being in bands, because I think building something together and me being with CC is so much cooler, better, and important and revolutionary than doing it individually, you know? But saying that, being on our own now, not really having to discuss everything makes the ideas and the songs I think a bit more pure. Like sometimes when you have too many opinions–and this is the same as what we were saying about the music videos, or producing, or just any decision–when your team starts to grow and there’s a lot of people around it and everyone has an opinion on it, sometimes it can dilute the rawness and the pureness of the idea, right? So we found ourselves when we were writing these songs–not so much in the writing ‘cause the writing didn’t change that much–especially in the producing and recording of these songs, it felt so freeing, you know? We weren’t fighting for–like talking about myself, sometimes in the past I’ve been like “oh I wrote this solo and I want it to sound like amazing and louder,” and maybe it just doesn’t go with the vocal, it’s going against it rather than together. Being less people, everyone was working so hard and we were so connected that no one felt like we weren’t good enough or big enough, which made it better for the song, you know? The song wasn’t paying the price of the ego or the insecurities of the musicians. It was just, yeah in that sense, a lot more freeing, and I think a lot better for the actual songs and the final result.
AP: It’s also kind of funny to me then that on VIVA HINDS you have a couple collaboration songs: one with Grian Chatten (of Fontaines D.C.) and one with Beck. What was that like collaborating? How much of a give-and-take was it? How much was it you being like “this is how I want the song to be and I’d like you on it” compared to full-on collaboration like, “Beck, what do you think we should do?”
P: I mean both songs, actually–even though the two artists are very different to each other–the process was pretty similar in the sense of like, [CC and I] wrote the whole song. The song was finished and kinda was gonna happen even if they didn’t join, you know? Like we didn’t start the song thinking about them either, you know? We wrote the songs and then with Beck it was more like a coincidence of just being in LA, writing that day, him asking “how was the studio?” us playing it to him, and him saying “hey I really like the song!” and us saying that we know opportunity and being like “why don’t you sing on it?” But yeah the song was already done. Like the demo sounded pretty similar to the final result, and same with Grian. We wrote the song and then asked him on. But we gave them both absolute freedom to do whatever they wanted, and it’s a funny little anecdote of the Grian part that he–because we wanted to give him the freedom to do whatever he wanted–we didn’t wanna start recording the song until he sent us his part. He did send us his part like on a demo version but he never sent the final vocals, the clean vocals. So then he waited until the night before the last day of the studio–I’m not even kidding you–the last day of the studio, the night before, he sent his part. So we had to rethink the whole thing, CC rewrote her whole verse, like it was a complete different thing because we didn’t know if he was going to sing in the chorus, how long it was going to be, if he was gonna change stuff. Obviously they’re both fucking geniuses, right? So we were like, “who do I think I am, telling them what to do?” They both had absolute freedom and I’m so glad they did, because obviously that’s what you want when you want a collaboration. You don’t want them to do what you would do, you want them to do what they did. The closest thing to producing, or like guiding them, is with Grian. When he sent us his final vocal take, we actually liked it less than the demo version, which is something that happens to us a lot. Because obviously when you’re writing–when you’re recording without any sort of expectations–there’s some magic there that once you know you’re going to be perceived and heard, maybe you… you don’t overthink it, but you deliver it differently. So we decided to take his demo version of the song rather than the final take that he did, but that’s it. Apart from that, they did absolutely everything themselves.
AP: I was reading a little bit about that encounter with Beck that led to the collaboration. You literally just found him out at a bar by chance and started talking to him. That just kind of happened?
P: I’m not even kidding you. I know it sounds bad. Fake. And it sounds like the conclusion of everything is: always go to the bar, because Beck could be there and you can end up with a song with him. But it’s true! It’s really true.
AP: Oh that’s fantastic. And I have been kind of obsessed with that song [“Boom Boom Back”].
That brings me to the live show. Do you have a favorite song to perform, or favorite moment of your show?
P: We only have played one show of this tour, but entering… starting the show with “Hi, How Are You” feels like a statement. ‘Cause, for all of these years that we’ve been playing and touring, we always used to go with a walk-in song. And it’s something that we took care of, we chose the song, and it was part of the show, you know? It was important for us. Suddenly, walking in the complete silence and just hearing that riff of the guitar ‘cause it starts like so driven but it’s so empty and so raw, and it starts with “Hi, how are you?” Like, it just–it’s like an automatic thing that just gets me right away. And then I also really, really enjoy performing “Superstar,” and “Stranger.” I’m lying, I enjoy them all.
AP: I’ve also been obsessed with “Superstar,” that one I think I’ve listened to the most out of the whole album.
P: Me too, I think.
AP: Because I’m doing this interview as a preview for your show, what would you say to try to get people to come to your show? What would you say to somebody who’s maybe on the fence? How would you sell the show to them?
P: I would say that live music is–right now–the best way to get away from your problems, or to feel inspired, and to feel united in a world that’s more divided, and sad, and lonely, and brutal…
Honestly, every time I go to a fucking show, it just makes me realize that we can be okay, we’re gonna be okay, we can get through things together. I just think it’s so magical that we can connect through music. And I think Hinds, it’s… I don’t know, I think it’s revolutionary at the same time as it’s comforting, which it’s not very common, I think, you know? Like you can feel good while you’re feeling angry, and sad and stuff, but surrounded by people that feel the same way. And like I was saying before, just making something bigger by everyone being together rather than… individualistic, just doing your own thing. I think it’s a community kind of band.
AP: Great pitch! I’m sold.
Hinds are playing at Brighton Music Hall on Monday, October 28th. You can check out their recent album on Bandcamp, and check their website for further tour dates.
