“It's funny because we started Hinds because we wanted to. We had the idea of doing a band – then we just did it.”
As master plans go, the formation of Hinds is quite deliriously simple. Four friends from Madrid, the all-girl quartet initially congregated as Deers before a swift name changed seemed to spur them forwards.
“The lo-fi thing is the only choice we have so we didn't know the kind of music we were going to do was going to be like that,” explains Carlotta Cosials. “Sometimes you can love a kind of music but when you try to write songs something different comes out. But not this time. It was so good to have that. We really love the music we do, and that's so important.”
Part of a small but close-knit Madrid scene, Hinds are fired by the energy they find around them. “Madrid has a very little scene but for us, it's very strong because we've grown up there,” the singer explains. “We've seen all our friends start a band and we've been to every gig. We feel it's very, very strong. But it's not unusual at all. We love music and we really do a lot of things related to music. Like, all the time.”
With the likes of Bobby Gillespie and Black Keys’ Patrick Carney supporting their early demos, hype around Hinds was almost immediate. Heading to the south of Spain to record their debut album, the four piece wanted the record to sound like the work of a band – not four individual musicians.
“I think everything is important,” she states. “We really care about having good bass lines, we really care about the melodies of the voices, we really care about the lyrics – like, we spend so, so many hours in doing good lyrics. Lyrics that we love. And we also care a lot about the rhythm of the song. We really do care about every instrument. We don't have something over something – do you know what I mean? I think everything is important.”
Taking their live sound into the studio, Hinds deliberately kept sessions stripped back to retain their nascent energy. “We played it as if we were playing live. We want our music to be as similar as possible to our gigs. We don't go to a studio and get crazy about the different instruments, or doing new things. We're not like that at all, we're just the opposite. We want our guitars and our amps, if it's possible. Simple music.”
An incredible love, an enormous passion for what they do seems to ring through in each and every note. Hinds have incredible enthusiasm, an extraordinary sense of fun – imagine the delirium of Mac DeMarco’s live shows, the sheer fuzzed out bedlam of White Fence and the girl group sonatas of Phil Spector and you’d be close.
“Our attitude?” she asks at one point. “We love to have as much fun as we can, basically. That's the point of music.”
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WHAT: Fuzzed up garage pop with a ramshackle twist
WHERE: Madrid
GET 3 SONGS: 'Chilli Town', 'Bamboo', 'A Summer With Us'
FACT: Hinds were previously known as Deers until legal action from the similarly-titled band.
