Hinds, a four-piece rock band from Madrid, Spain, will touch down at Hotel Congress this Wednesday. The band comes to town on their last U.S. tour stop supporting their debut album, Leave Me Alone, which dropped on Jan. 8.
Hinds consists of Ana Perrote, Carlotta Cosials, Ade Martín and Amber Grimbergen. The band’s name translates to “does” — as in female deer.
Hinds’ garage-rock album has a serious side when compared to previous work, the band said in a media statement.
“[We] thought this album would be all party and cheerfulness but, surprise, it’s not! Feelings are more balanced, like in life,” Hinds said in the statement. “So suddenly we had a more sober — or even sad — album than we expected. Please don’t think we’ve turned into depressive people or something; we’ve always been humans. It’s just we’re now showing it to you.”
Perrote, Hinds’ vocalist and guitarist, talked with The Daily Wildcat over email about the secrets behind the band’s international success.
DW: Why do you choose to record in English instead of Spanish? Were you planning on targeting a global audience when you first started the band?
AP: We didn’t really think about it that much in the first place. When we started writing songs and singing randomly to find the melodies, the words you could barely understand were in English — it came naturally (funny huh). It’s probably because 99 percent of the music we listen to is sung in English, so our jams just sounded better for us in that language.
We never thought we were gonna play outside of Spain when we started, though.
Has the band’s U.S. success surprised you?
All the success around the world surprises us. We were the first Spanish band to play a late night show in the U.S., but [we were] also the first one to play a main stage in Glastonbury Festival … We played in Australia before the U.S., but played 16 shows at SXSW the first time we played … So we’ve always worked hard on being a global band and not only playing in the easy/close countries.
Otherwise, we wouldn’t have lost so much money every time we came to the states (especially because of visas).
But however, our main influences come from American bands, so somehow the dream of coming here seemed closer than going to Japan.
You’ve listed Ty Segall as an influence. Who else have you drawn influence from?
Fat White Family, Glass Animals, The Strokes, Mac DeMarco, The Growlers, Black Lips, Shannon and the Clams, Twin Peaks, Los Nastys.
Have you had a chance to play shows with any of these influences?
All of them.
The band has both a zine and an online game. Do you have a strong interest in multimedia?
Yeah man! We love technology and multimedia. It’s the easiest and most useful way of talking to our fans. When you don’t have money to print a million posters of a show, a record or whatever — just use this amazing invention called the internet.
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