Hinds Strut By way of Exhausting Occasions on ‘Viva Hinds’

The Spanish guitar goddesses in Hinds have been via it these days, and so they guess that you’ve got, too. They start their fabulously resilient Viva Hinds with “Hello, How Are You,” a garage-rock strut with some call-and-response about shaking off some unhealthy luck. Ana Perrotte sings, “Hey, you okay?” Carlotta Cosials replies, “I’ve been higher tbh.” Viva Hinds is their fourth and best album, a joyful, brash half-hour of swaggering tunes about dealing with as much as heartache by turning it right into a sarcastic joke, with guitars cranked up all the way in which. 

Like so many individuals, Hinds watched their lives crumble in the course of the pandemic. Proper after the Madrid indie-rockers dropped their third album The Prettiest Curse in 2020, their tour obtained cancelled, together with each different band’s tour. They obtained dumped by their administration. They obtained dumped by their label. Then their drummer and their bassist stop — the identical day. That left these two girls alone with one another, within the type of disaster the place most bands would admit defeat. 

However not Cosial and Perrotte. With their backs to the wall, they got here up with their funniest, meanest, catchiest tunes but, the sound of two associates with a uncommon knack for making one another chortle and alluring you in on it. They arrive on like madrileña sisters to Moist Leg or Elastica, waving their DGAF flags laborious. “Espresso” is a bouncy strum-along ode to the independent-woman life-style, as they sing, “I like black espresso and cigarettes/And flowers from boys I’m not sleeping with.” They attempt to tiptoe round having emotional wants, however you understand how that goes. “When did love get so fucked up?” they ask. “Lonely hearts killing time, begging Venus for a shag?” 

Hinds get assist from a few well-known associates. Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten drops in for “Strangers,” becoming proper into their sugary harmonies along with his surly Dublin punk sneer. “Strangers” is filled with echoey guitar ripples, evoking the legendary Madrid new wave scene of the Eighties, particularly bands like Esplendor Geométrico or El Ultimo Sueño. Beck joins them for the good “Increase Increase Again.” It’s a Midnite Vultures-worthy romp the place they’re bored at stylish events (“nope, thanks although, you realize I don’t do cocaine”), craving to flee to allow them to go fall in love at a sleazy bar and cruise round in a Mirage. The Vaccines’ Pete Robertson has their again on drums in addition to manufacturing.

Viva Hinds has the primary songs they’ve ever recorded of their native tongue, the moody “Mala Vista” and the delightfully peppy “En Forma,” which has manic Sixties French ye-ye power topped with Nineteen Eighties synth-pop blurts, but overflows with their punked-up angle. “The Mattress, The Room, The Rain and You” is bittersweet dream-pop within the mode of early New Order, as Perrotte and Cosials lament getting over a break-up. They mourn. “The mattress is you, the room is you, the rain is you, the blackbirds too.” However Hinds aren’t the sort to wallow in despair for lengthy, and Viva Hinds is a righteous soundtrack to leaving laborious occasions behind and dashing ahead.