Two days before the release of their sophomore record, Hinds rode around Madrid on a beer bike with a handful of strangers. The band had selected some lucky fans via social media to join a pedal-fueled adventure-cum-intimate album listening party, and naturally, a night of drinking and dancing ensued. “It was as good are you are imagining,” Ana García Perrote tells i-D. All four bandmates — singer-guitarists Perrote and Carlotta Cosials, drummer Amber Grimbergen, and bassist Ade Martin — belted out the lyrics to their brand new record as the bacchanalian celebration wove its way through their hometown, ready for the rest of the world to sing along too.
Dropping today, April 6th, I Don’t Run is 11 tracks of sunny garage rock at its finest. The music still has that gritty, DIY feel that made Hinds’ debut album, Leave Me Alone, so nostalgically alluring, but is subtly sharper in exactly the right ways. Co-produced by Gordon Raphael (The Strokes) and mixed by Shawn Everett (Alabama Shakes, Julian Casablancas), the album allows Hinds’ signature fuzz pop vocals and addictive hooks to shine thanks to cleaner production. The songwriting, too, is excellent. Emotionally charged and honest, lyrics are straightforward, and void of overly-convoluted metaphors — they say exactly what they mean and they’ll resonate with you deeply. “Not many people make records like this anymore,” says Perrote. “From the cover to the artwork to the lyrics to the bass to the guitar solos — everything makes sense together, everything is one piece.”
Below, i-D speaks with Perrote about the new release.
Has touring as a band changed your friendship dynamic at all?
The more time we spend together, the more we become like sisters instead of friends. We know each other so well and it can be good and bad, you know? The biggest thing is how we’ve been growing on our own. We still love each other and have fun and we’re still best friends, but it’s been more about what we can personally do to make that relationship better.
You recorded Leave Me Alone during an insanely busy time. Did that experience affect how you approached I Don’t Run ?
100 percent. When we were writing our first record, everything was so rushed. We were already touring the world so we never had a break. It was good for us to push ourselves to our extreme but we were like, okay, there’s no fucking way we can do this again. For I Don’t Run, we got to a place where we could take a pause and completely focus on it. I’m really happy we did.
Production-wise, things sounds a but more polished than on your first record. Was that a goal going in?
Like we did with Leave Me Alone, we just recorded ourselves the way we are now. Records are big jumps from one to another and we’ve just been doing little steps in between everyday, you know? We brought Gordon Raphael to co-produce it and working with a native English speaker really made a difference in terms of helping with our pronunciation. Gordon would ask us to sing to him acapella and if he didn’t understand something he would stop us and be like, “What did you say there?” It was cool because he didn’t really want to change us, he wanted to keep the accents but make everything more clear. We also brought Sean Everett in from Los Angeles — he was totally a magician for us. The producing world, we understand it. But the mixing one is still a fairytale to us. It turned out exactly how we wanted.
How did you approach the songwriting?
The topics we talk about in this record are more introspective and the way we’re talking about them is more direct. In Leave Me Alone we had so many metaphors and hidden tricks — we would make the lyrics so complex that maybe it wasn’t easy for other people to understand them. We decided we really wanted to just say what we wanted to say on I Don’t Run.
Do you have a favorite track or one that stands out?
“Finally Floating.” I think it shows the most passionate side of Hinds. Throughout the whole record, we talk about dreams, going to bed, waking up, not being able to sleep, all of those things. Being in a band, especially being in Hinds, is totally a job of being friendly and sociable and meeting people constantly, all the time. If one day I want to be an asshole and not talk to anyone, I can’t do that. The only moment that you have real privacy and are totally relaxed in is when you’re about to go to bed. You’re there and that’s it, you’re done for the day. So I think we got a little bit obsessed with that concept in the record, especially on “Finally Floating.”
You just wrapped up the U.S. leg of your tour. Do you have a favorite memory from it?
Oh yes, I have a really good story. We were doing a co-headlining tour with Albert Hammond Jr., meaning sometimes we’d come out after him and sometimes we’d come out before him. When we were playing in Houston, we played first. The show was really good so we got really drunk at the end and were just having a good time watching Albert’s show. I don’t know why, but I had five dollars in my pocket so I went on stage, waved it in his face, turned him around and put the money in his waistband. His face was like, “What!?” The funniest thing was he sent me a message in WhatsApp saying, “I’ll see you tomorrow on stage, I have my five dollars ready!” But right before we went on stage he was like, “Dude, I’m not going to do it. You’re young and cool but if I do that and no one knows the story it’s going to look pretty creepy.”
You guys have spoken before about having not truly experienced sexism until you entered the music industry. How did affect you as a band?
When we got into the industry, we realized that we had no option but to be outspoken feminists. You can’t not fight for equality if you’re in this industry, you know? There are so many men trying to put you down and saying you don’t know shit because you’re a woman, because you’re young, because you’re smiling, because you’re wearing a skirt, because you’re not wearing a skirt, because you’re too beautiful, because you’re too ugly. We just realized we had to fight that all, otherwise we wouldn’t exist. If I wasn’t with Carlotta, Ade, and Amber, I don’t know if I could have fought as I have. We are lucky to have each other.
You’re about to kick off the European leg of your tour. Has the excitement of performing live started to wear off at all?
We still have the same passion and the same I-really-can’t-fucking-wait-for-tonight vibe. Always. The thing we like the most is playing live and it’s crazy that we’re still saying that after playing so much, you know? I think where we are right now, we know exactly what we’re doing, we know exactly who we are, where we are at, and where we want to be.