The Spanish guitar goddesses in Hinds have been through it lately, and they bet that you have, too. They begin their fabulously resilient Viva Hinds with “Hi, How Are You,” a garage-rock strut with some call-and-response about shaking off some bad luck. Ana Perrotte sings, “Hey, you okay?” Carlotta Cosials replies, “I’ve been better tbh.” Viva Hinds is their fourth and finest album, a joyful, brash half-hour of swaggering tunes about facing up to heartache by turning it into a sarcastic joke, with guitars cranked up all the way.
Like so many people, Hinds watched their lives fall apart during the pandemic. Right after the Madrid indie-rockers dropped their third album The Prettiest Curse in 2020, their tour got cancelled, along with every other band’s tour. They got dumped by their management. They got dumped by their label. Then their drummer and their bassist quit — the same day. That left these two women alone with each other, in the kind of crisis where most bands would admit defeat.
But not Cosial and Perrotte. With their backs to the wall, they came up with their funniest, meanest, catchiest tunes yet, the sound of two friends with a rare knack for making each other laugh and inviting you in on it. They come on like madrileña sisters to Wet Leg or Elastica, waving their DGAF flags hard. “Coffee” is a bouncy strum-along ode to the independent-woman lifestyle, as they sing, “I love black coffee and cigarettes/And flowers from boys I’m not sleeping with.” They try to tiptoe around having emotional needs, but you know how that goes. “When did love get so fucked up?” they ask. “Lonely hearts killing time, begging Venus for a shag?”
Hinds get help from a couple of famous friends. Fontaines D.C. frontman Grian Chatten drops in for “Strangers,” fitting right into their sugary harmonies with his surly Dublin punk sneer. “Strangers” is full of echoey guitar ripples, evoking the legendary Madrid new wave scene of the Eighties, especially bands like Esplendor Geométrico or El Ultimo Sueño. Beck joins them for the great “Boom Boom Back.” It’s a Midnite Vultures-worthy romp where they’re bored at chic parties (“nope, thank you though, you know I don’t do cocaine”), yearning to escape so they can go fall in love at a sleazy bar and cruise around in a Mirage. The Vaccines’ Pete Robertson has their back on drums as well as production.
Viva Hinds has the first songs they’ve ever recorded in their native tongue, the moody “Mala Vista” and the delightfully peppy “En Forma,” which has manic 1960s French ye-ye energy topped with 1980s synth-pop blurts, yet overflows with their punked-up attitude. “The Bed, The Room, The Rain and You” is bittersweet dream-pop in the mode of early New Order, as Perrotte and Cosials lament getting over a break-up. They mourn. “The bed is you, the room is you, the rain is you, the blackbirds too.” But Hinds aren’t the type to wallow in despair for long, and Viva Hinds is a righteous soundtrack to leaving hard times behind and rushing forward.
