2020 was a difficult year for everyone, but for Spanish garage rock duo HINDS it was only the beginning. Having a album tour cancelled due to lockdown, Ana & Carlotta also endured the pain of band members quitting as well as splitting from both their management and their label. As Ana tells the story, ‘It felt like the universe wasn’t letting us exist. It wasn’t up to us.’

But quitting was never an option and now HINDS are back with their first new album in four years appropriately titled, ‘VIVA HINDS‘. ‘Fans started shouting it at our shows one day,’ explains Carlotta, ‘It wasn’t even just one show. It was uncontrollable and unpredictable…and spread like Covid!’

After all these traumas, the album sees the band explore all kinds of experiences, with maybe their most diverse album yet. VIVA HINDS features the girls’ first track in Spanish, with a rap no less, collaborations with Beck & Fontaines’ DC’s Grian Chatten and our favourite track, ‘Superstar’, which had us low-key crying at the just the opening lines. So Loverboy caught up with Ana and Carlotta to find out more about the album, their upcoming tour and the power in surviving.

So, the last time I saw you both was FANGO festival in Barcelona. That was a hot day!
Ana: Yes, we could have performed better if we weren’t just focusing on surviving! But it was the first time playing this new music in Spain, and it was a festival not a HINDS show, so we didn’t really know what to expect. We were so surprised though! Everyone was telling us their favourite memories to HINDS songs, showing us their HINDS tattoos! We came back saying, ‘I didn’t realise we were the biggest band in Barcelona right now?!’ 

There was such a mish mash of people there too. Like a stag party at the back with guys in flamenco dresses waxing their legs. Haha…
A: To be fair that’s exactly how we want a HINDS show to be. That sounds like heaven.

You walked onstage to Hot Chocolate’s ‘You Sexy Thing’ with the opening line ‘I believe in miracles.’ Is this your motto from ther last four years?
Carlotta: Having a walk-on song gives you a couple of good lines to say like, ‘Hey wake up!’ We never want to forget how amazing it is to be able to play our music live with an audience in front of us. ‘I believe in miracles’ is such a good line because it’s like, ‘It’s true, I can’t believe this.’

Then you have the bonus of ‘You sexy thing!’
A: Yes, it’s always good to feel sexy!

You’ve been through some pretty dark times in the last four years. When it was the darkest, did you consider quitting? Or was that never an option?
C: Maybe for ten seconds but the moment we looked into each other’s eyes, we knew we were going to continue. We’d been sweating our asses off and then when finally the two members left, we were like, ‘Oh my God what comes now is not going to be easy at all but still, let’s go for it.’
A: It was even worse than considering quitting. One thing after the other happened until it felt like the universe wasn’t letting us exist. It wasn’t up to us. Everything that happened in those four years has been very tough and we have overcome it.

Right, because creativity doesn’t stop. 
A: That was the hardest part. Suddenly we didn’t have a label, management, band members even. For years we couldn’t play shows or release music even though we wanted to. But we haven’t stopped working from 10am-4pm over these four years. Every fucking morning we worked, we just couldn’t show it. No one knew. We were dead on the outside even though we were full of life on the inside. It was so frustrating. Like, ‘If we are not releasing music and playing shows, what are we?’

I imagine the good thing from this is that you had a tonne of songs to choose from for VIVA HINDS!
C: Yes.
A: We have a lot of silly demos we could sing to you now. But we can tell when a song is not worth finishing. We always lack time because we do everything ourselves. We were finishing the album in the studio when Coldplay rang, asking us to open for them in Barcelona. Then we weren’t able to finish those extra songs we had written. So we had to be very aware of how we used our time. It was just a natural decision with the songs on the album. Except we actually have one more recorded that we are keeping as a surprise to drop at some point.

You’re only keeping one out of all the others?
C: Yep, because an exclusive for us is that we are already writing for the next album. Ana, I haven’t told you this, but José, my friend from poker, told me his favourite song of HINDS, is the one we have that is very radio friendly, with the dry verse and then the chorus?
A: Of course, the one we all loved.
C: He said it was the best song we have ever written! It’s a fucking demo and we haven’t even finished it.
A: Yes, I agree with your poker friends.

Writing for this album, there must have been a lot of emotions to break through. Did you find that sometimes you were writing about different situations on the same song, like a lover leaving you but also your bandmates leaving?
C: We don’t like sending hidden messages. We are very straight forward, we speak the truth. We are not passive aggressive. If we are mad, we will tell you, like, ‘Dude, that really hurt me.’ We never blame other people and have a very strong perspective of, ‘Hey wait, I also did something wrong here.’ I don’t know if that is because we are two songwriters. Even when we get angry with someone, I think we are so classy. Haha…
A: Also because we are two writers, we have that universality. Sometimes we write about things we have each lived individually, sometimes it’s the same story. Carlotta, I don’t think I told you this but Alberto, who designed the artwork for this album, asked me which single was going to be next. I told him, ‘The Bed, The Room, The Rain & You.’ He said, ‘Oh that’s the one about V.’ I was like, ‘No it’s the one about K!’ Totally different boys. I thought it was so funny because obviously for Carlotta it’s about this guy and for me it’s a different one. That’s the beauty of music. You relate to it even if you haven’t been through that situation.

The response has been so great to all of the singles. Which are you most pleased about?
C: For me, ‘Coffee’ was the biggest surprise ever but the feedback for ‘Superstar’ has been the confirmation for me. Maybe at first people were thinking, ‘Oh, ‘Boom Boom Back’, that’s too silly.’ But suddenly ‘Superstar’ is like a fist on the table. People are like, ‘Dude, this is so fucking good.’

I have to say at the beginning of ‘Superstar’ I had a tear in my eye because it’s really intimate and emotional. There’s a definite shift to being angry but at the beginning it’s sad.
A: I started crying mid-recording. I genuinely couldn’t stop my feelings. The producer started crying too. It was very intense. That’s why I am so surprised it’s being so well received. Maybe I am being unfair to the audience, but it’s very long, it’s four minutes and we yell at some point. It’s quite complex too. It’s definitely not ‘Boom Boom Back’ or ‘Coffee.’ They are straight in your face, instant bangers. ‘Superstar’ is charged with emotion, which if you can take it, good. But not everyone can. It’s mad because it’s always been one of our favourites but we didn’t know it would be received like this.

The lyric that has stuck with me from the album is ‘Mirame, no puedo mas!’ I love it. Tell me about singing songs in Spanish…
C: It just felt really natural to be honest. We had flirted with the idea of singing in Spanish before but we had to develop a taste because none of us had really listened to songs in Spanish. When I was a teenager, it was always in English.
A: You used to listen to a lot of rap and you wrote ‘En Forma’ kind of like a rap…
C: It’s such a rap. I’m basically rapping! No…only joking. But it is true that when I was younger I listened to a lot of rap in Spanish. We both love Castilian. It’s such a beautiful language. We love being able to switch between the two and how they each describe feelings differently.
With ‘En Forma’ I was actually in a plane and had a mini-crisis, trying to get over an ex. So I started writing down all the things that are going to make me a better person. It started really naturally, it didn’t have a chorus, just the first verse, a few chords and stuff. When I showed it to Ana we were like, ‘Wow, we have to keep it like this!’ The idea of it being in English wasn’t even a conversation.

I’m sure you have a big LGBT+ following at your shows too, right?
A: At our shows we see a lot of gays, a lot of girls…honestly it’s amazing because we also have a lot of white hetero-normative men. It’s so exciting seeing them sing to songs about ‘This is how you make me feel in bed!’ It’s amazing to see a fifty-year-old man singing, ‘All I want is my boy!’ It is super cool that we can write songs where girls feel represented, the gay community too.

Talking of that heteronormative masc energy, I love that you’ve brought Beck and Grian from Fontaines DC into your world and they have lost all of that!
A: We are doing them a favour! Haha…It’s like greenwashing but with heteronormative men. I’m kidding obviously and we wouldn’t work with them if they weren’t open-minded. It is fun because we have put so much work into being a girl band and we always try to work with as many women as possible. Nine out of the eleven crew on the ‘Superstar’ video were female. Our managers have been female. We always try to put our money where our mouth is. That also gives us the freedom to not feel guilty about how on this album both collaborations are with men.

How did you come to meet Grian?
C: We are actually long time friends. There was a moment in time where HINDS were bigger than Fontaines DC. Hard to believe. Haha…But they opened for us at our Dublin show. Plus do you know what is super cool? It’s not that easy to have a cis-hetero guy admiring a girl in an artistic way. But Fontaines DC were huge fans of ours. They really wanted to open for us there in Dublin. They even had to audition for the show because it was so early in their career. That really proved to me that the world is changing and that a band of guys can admire a band made of girls. Then a couple of years ago we saw each other at so many festivals that we bonded again. Suddenly becoming adult friends instead of kids back then in 2016. We still liked each other too which was cool! Haha…
A: When we were going through all those low moments, we felt very lonely and we didn’t have a lot of places to ask for advice or even emotional support. But Fontaines DC were really there for us during those couple of years. So it’s really nice that Grian ended up being on the album.

Lastly we are named after the biggest-selling single of 2001, so we always ask, what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
C: The Christmas one?! Haha…
A: We can’t do any better than ‘The Christmas one.’ It’s silly because we don’t have a lot of pop cultural references. Some of my closest friends are gay and they know everything about pop. So I have requested a playlist from them for us to study! We love pop culture. We just don’t know about it because we grew up being indie kids listening to fucking guitar music. But now that we are Brats we can work on our pop culture.

VIVA HINDS is out now
For Live Dates including UK Tour 2025 see www.hinds.os.fan