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Jan 22, 2021 By Matt Conner Photography by Andrea Savall Issue #67 - Phoebe Bridgers and Moses Sumney

The women of Hinds just needed some time to themselves.

For the last few years, Ana Perrote says that she and the rest of the Spanish quartet (Carlotta Cosials, Ade Martín, Amber Grimbergen) have made their music on the fly, with short stints for songwriting in their native Madrid between various tour legs. They’ve lived out of suitcases for years on end, and after two full album cycles of full-on global tours, the members of Hinds were ready for some personal space (this was before the pandemic made such space necessary).

If you’re new to Hinds, they have generated significant buzz since their inception. The band were already playing all over Europe before their debut album (2015’s Leave Me Alone) was even released thanks to instant acclaim on their first singles and early tour slots with The Libertines and Black Lips. I Don’t Run was the Gordon Raphael-produced (The Strokes) follow-up in 2018 and cemented their standing with critics and fans alike. The success was hard-earned, and after years of the musical cycle, Perrote admits it was time for a break.

“When you tour, you put a coat on top of all of those problems,” she says. “It doesn’t mean they weren’t problems before, but it’s just that everything’s so hectic that we didn’t have time to stop and realize what was happening. Then when we stopped [last] year, it was a big shock of reality. A lot of things happened for each of us and it was hard to move on.”

Some difficult realities surfaced for Perrote and the others as Hinds decided to break for a full year to write and record what would become the band’s latest, The Prettiest Curse. Perrote says it stems from making the difficult choice to slow themselves for the first time.

“There’s always something in the back of your head saying, ‘If you disappear now, everyone will forget about you.’ Nowadays everyone is releasing a new song every fucking week,” says Perrote. “It’s such a hectic way of consuming music, especially for a rock band where we write everything and stuff, it does feel like everything is going to stop. Then you realize one year isn’t that much.”

The Prettiest Curse features a greater range of influences and instrumentation than ever before, showcasing a newfound confidence. Perrote says the unhurried approach might have brought some nerves, but it also allowed for greater risks to be taken, creatively speaking.

“It felt really good to have so much time to think about the album and to write. When you’re able to write in different places in different seasons—like London in February or L.A. in August—your moods are totally different. Depending on the surroundings, you write different songs. So I’m really happy we did that,” says Perrote.

“The new album is a lot more colorful. It has dark places and bright places,” she continues. “It has anger and happiness. I do feel like it was all because we didn’t have to rush it all in one month of writing. We’re only humans, so we’re going to write about the mood we have in the moment. But over a year, we had so many different moods, so I’m happy we did that.”

[Note: This article originally appeared in Issue 67 of Under the Radar’s print magazine, which is out now. This is its debut online.]

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