Hinds

HINDS IN LONDON, NOVEMBER 2015. ON ADE MARTÍN: JUMPSUIT: RAG & BONE. T-SHIRT: SUNSPEL. NECKLACE: MOMOCREATURA. ON ANA PERROTE: DRESS: JOSEPH. T-SHIRT: TOPSHOP. PANTS, NECKLACE, AND RING: PERROTE’s OWN. ON AMBER GRIMBERGEN: JACKET: BLK DNM. T-SHIRT: LEVI’S. JEANS: GRIMBERGEN’S OWN. NECKLACE: MOMOCREATURA. ON CARLOTTA COSIALS: JACKET: BLK DNM. T-SHIRT: J BRAND. PANTS: McQ BY ALEXANDER MCQUEEN. HAIR: KEI TERADA/JULIAN WATSON AGENCY. MAKEUP: THOMAS DE KLUYVER FOR CHANEL ROUGE COCO/D+V MANAGEMENT. SPECIAL THANKS: RAILWAY ARCH. 

“We love the USA!” singer-guitarist Carlotta Cosials exclaims. “Seriously, you make the musician feel so comfortable.” Though Cosials’s love for America might be ebullient, it is newfound, as her Spanish garage-rock band, Hinds, has been active for less than two years in its current form and first played in North America last spring. Following a handful of raucous singles inspired by American acts like the Black Lips, the quartet (Cosials, Ana Perrote, Ade Martín, and Amber Grimbergen) performed 16 shows in four days during South by Southwest, landed a slot at Glastonbury, and last month released their debut album, Leave Me Alone (Mom + Pop/Lucky Number). The 12 songs chronicle emotions felt during the band’s tours and rapid growth, often dwelling on love and loss atop lo-fi, heavy guitar anthems.

“We are very loving persons,” Cosials says of the new album, “but we’re trying to collect these completely different feelings.” Split between Cosials and Perrote, the vocals go from indignation (“You said it was gonna be easy / Now you’re driving away / Got no tears to share,” from “Easy”) to longing (“Sorry, you’re the one that I love / I can tell you you’re my favorite song /… You’re the reason I’m coming home,” from “Walking Home”). Home for the band is Madrid, where the four young women, who range from 19 to 24 years old, came together in the city’s vibrant garage-rock scene. “It was in 2009, the golden age, when I discovered the scene,” Cosials recalls. “There were two teams: the ‘pure ones,’ who were listening to the oldies, and the ‘Interpol ones.’ ” Cosials and Perrote met as pure ones and formed a duo, but as they developed their sound as a four-piece, they decided to focus on giving energetic performances and to “support the music of now,” because “we live in the present and the present is the best way you have.”

Modernizing their approach propelled the band from “the really, really bottom” to the middle of the music industry. As Cosials explains, comparing Hinds’ ascent to learning to swim, “You go little by little, you learn step by step, with bigger swimming pools, then the ocean. But what happened to us, they dropped us in the middle of the fucking ocean, and everybody was watching. Everybody watches us learn, improve, and grow up. A lot of insecurity, sometimes, but every day we feel better than the day before.”