Hinds' Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials on becoming a duo and overcoming adversity to make fourth album 'VIVA HINDS' • Interview • DIY Magazine

It’s 2014, and Madrid-based best friends Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials are in crisis. Their fledgling band, Deers – a scrappy but fresh-sounding, infectiously fun garage-rock project – has just started to gain attention from the UK music press, but a Canadian outfit, The Dears, has threatened them with legal action over their name. Faced with little choice but to pick a new moniker, the pair settle on Hinds – or “female deers”.

Although hindsight (no pun intended) can confirm that the rebrand didn’t hinder their prospects, at the time it felt like a huge obstacle to overcome. “Because we were forced to change, we didn’t feel like Hinds,” Carlotta – or CC, as she’s affectionately referred to by Ana – sighs. “So the fans started screaming ‘Viva Hinds!’ at shows – like, ‘Hey, we don’t care what the hell you’re called!’ The phrase has remained a [source of] strength for us, a chant. And during these last couple of years, which haven’t been easy, it’s become like a mantra for us: Viva Hinds. Don’t lose it. Don’t lose the enthusiasm. Because if you lose faith in the music, you’re out of the game completely.”

Sitting today in what Ana has pronounced “the best pub garden in London” (The Faltering Fullback in Finsbury Park, for anyone keen to compare notes), the pair are a solid unit. However, titling their fourth album ‘VIVA HINDS’ is as much a defiant assertion of endurance as it is a fond homage to their roots: it’s both a celebration of how far they’ve come, and the mission statement of a record that, at one point, they weren’t even sure would be made.

“During these last couple of years, which haven’t been easy, ‘Viva Hinds’ has become like a mantra for us.” — Carlotta Cosials

The four-year gap since 2020’s ‘The Prettiest Curse’ has been the longest Hinds have gone without releasing new music since they started doing so a decade ago; debut LP ‘Leave Me Alone’ arrived in 2016, and was soon followed by sophomore effort ‘I Don’t Run’ in 2018. With the pandemic putting paid to their third album tour, it also kickstarted a series of unfortunate events that saw Ana and Carlotta part ways with their management, their label and, most significantly, their longtime bassist Ade Martin and drummer Amber Grimbergen (they play with live bandmates Paula Ruiz and María Lázaro now, but Hinds is essentially a duo).

“It’s been a domino effect of slaps in our face, basically,” says Ana, smiling grimly. “Everything was started by the pandemic, for sure; that hit us really, really hard. We spent all our savings recording our third album, then we released it during lockdown, which obviously didn’t go very well. We were all pretty sad and very disconnected for two years.” She pauses, considering her words. “CC and I reconnected and got over that sadness. We shook each other and went, ‘Stop feeling sorry for yourselves and just start doing something’, and [Ade and Amber] just didn’t really jump on that train.”

Bruised, confused, but clinging to the liferaft of their foundational friendship, the pair took some time to regroup. “For a very long time we really didn’t want to make an album because we were angry at the world,” says Carlotta. “Then we were waiting: for the pandemic to finish; for a record deal; for a manager; for things to come back to normality. But what is normality any more?”

Eventually, they realised that there would never be a ‘right’ time to resurrect Hinds. As with the band’s unceremonious re-christening, they instead needed to set about stoking a new fire from the ashes of the old. “We just said, ‘We don’t care if we have to record [‘VIVA HINDS’] in fucking GarageBand, we’re going to do it’,” Ana grins. “As soon as we changed to that mentality, things started happening and life started getting a tiny bit easier.”

Though Ana and Carlotta founded Hinds, and have always been the primary songwriters, Ade and Amber were very much part of the fabric of the band – the completion of a quartet who embodied a sense of female community, unselfconscious enthusiasm, and an inspiringly doing-their-own-thing attitude. Hinds was the gang you wanted to be part of; it felt empowering without a ‘girl power’ schtick. For fans, then, it was a real shock to hear of their departure. “It was a huge surprise,” Ana affirms of their own reactions from the inside. “We didn’t want them to leave; we didn’t kick them out or anything. It had been a very hard few years, with no money and stuff. And obviously…” she hesitates. “The project was never theirs, you know? It kind of felt like it was a bit of a test: ‘How much do you want to be in Hinds? No but really – is it for fame? For the money? For success?’”

“It’s definitely a bit of a darker album, and we show a side that maybe we haven’t [before].” — Ana Perrote

There’s always been a direct, diaristic quality to Hinds’ lyricism – a combination of their no-punches-pulled honesty and the fact that, more often than not, they’re singing in their second language. It’s perhaps inevitable, then, that echoes of this turbulent time can be heard on ‘VIVA HINDS’, and yet even so, recent single (and standout album track) ‘Superstar’ is starkly forthright. Introduced via gentle guitars and a tender, shared vocal line, it quickly builds into a howl of frustration at its eponymous “local superstar”, concluding with a biting outro: “You made your choice / You lawyered up / You threatened us / You changed the past / You didn’t even say goodbye”.

“We don’t really want to go into detail with that,” says Ana of these lyrics. “It’s kind of like a magician revealing the truth behind a trick, you know?” She continues: “We’ve had to grow up a lot, in a bad way. We’ve had to deal with things that we felt like we were too young to be dealing with – a lot of money situations, betrayal, sadness. It’s definitely a bit of a darker album, and we show a side that maybe we haven’t [before].”

There’s no doubt that ‘VIVA HINDS’ is the band’s most multifaceted record to date. On ‘En Forma’ – a track about the often overwhelming demands of being a woman – they sing entirely in Spanish for the first time; given their position as trailblazers for non-native English speakers who’ve successfully entered the orbit of British alt-rock, it’s somewhat of a milestone. The Grian Chatten-featuring ‘Stranger’, meanwhile, is about the dissociation Ana felt during “one of the darkest summers of [her] life”. Of their collaboration, she says simply: “Grian’s been a friend for a while. He knows more about the depths of everything that’s happened to us, so it felt like the [right] moment to have a song together.”

Alongside this maturity, however, is also a marked return to their roots. Lead single ‘Coffee’ is a sassy testament to pleasurable vices that could easily find a home on ‘Leave Me Alone’’s tracklist, while ‘Mala Vista’ could be a reverb-drenched reincarnation of LP2 cut ‘The Club’ and ‘Boom Boom Back’ (featuring Beck) channels their early-days playfulness with irresistible swagger.

Decamping to secluded houses in rural France to record, they worked free from the logistical constraints which birthed the live sounds of ‘I Don’t Run’ (a record that Ana says “clearly sounds like a band that has been touring nonstop for a fucking year and a half”), or the experimental inclinations which informed the comparatively high production of ‘The Prettiest Curse’ (“So much polish!” laughs Carlotta).

The result is a record that possesses the same rough edges and rawness that made audiences – particularly English crowds – fall in love with them in the first place. “Si, I think we’re somehow coming back to the very beginning,” Carlotta nods, as she and Ana exchange a knowing, affirming glance. “In here,” she taps her chest, “you guys always trusted in us.” A return to their roots in much more than just name, ‘VIVA HINDS’ is a reintroduction to a pair who’ve always operated on their own terms. The stakes may have changed, but one thing is for sure – Hinds are betting on themselves again.