How The Luxury Of Time Made Spanish Indie Rockers Hinds 'More Rich And More Colourful'

Good Bad Times (the second single to be lifted from Hinds' vivacious third album, The Prettiest Curse) could be Tame Impala's long-lost wayward sister; all woozy vocals, measured bass and sunshine-y choruses. This song's deliberately OTT, Jean LaFleur-directed film clip depicts the band members as superheroes and is definitely worth a gander. And is it just us or are there Spice Girls flavours sprinkled over Boy's chant-vocals? We're all for it. The quartet's third single, Come Back And Love Me <3, saunters in at the LP's halfway mark, all Spanish guitar plucking and lovelorn pleas. Is that xylophone or toy piano? There's even a whistling outro. 

Vocalist/guitarist Carlotta Cosials reveals Come Back And Love Me <3 was the first song Hinds wrote for this album when The Music spoke to her before the full impact of COVID-19 hit their native Spain. "We wrote in the very winter... and I think, of Come Back And Love Me <3, the things that I'm more proud of is the production and the selection of the instruments we're playing."

Cosials explains that Hinds wanted their latest record to have a clear direction and cohesive theme. "I don't wanna say a conceptual album because it sounds super..." Wanky? She laughs, "Yeah, exactly. But, you know, something like instead of having some songs that you put together and the only thing that they have in common is the time you wrote them, doing exactly the opposite thing." And as a first, Hinds had the luxury of time for this one. "The second album [I Don't Run], we wrote the whole thing in a month and a half, and the first album [Leave Me Alone] we wrote in between tours. When you have time, the cool thing is that you write things different when you write them in the middle of August or in the beginning of January, you know? You're feeling different things, you saw different things, you are into different stuff - so I think it makes the album more rich and more colourful."

The Prettiest Curse sees Hinds singing in their native tongue more than they ever have before - "an artistic decision," Cosials tells. "We were always thinking, 'Let's use more Castilian,' and suddenly - when you're actually doing it - it was a little bit scary in the way that suddenly we have the whole dictionary to use," she says, "because I know almost the whole dictionary in Spanish, but not in English, d'you know what I mean? [laughs]... Suddenly, speaking in Spanish, it was like, 'Dude, I know all the connotations of each word, I know if I say it like this it's gonna sound childish and I know if I say it like that it's gonna sound real cheesy,' so, yeah! It was kind of scary. But I think it turns out really nice in Boy or in Come Back And Love Me - in the songs that are in Spanish; I think they don't surprise you more than the English ones."

Having once heard a Swedish friend mention that after spending a lot of time among English-speaking friends, she actually found herself thinking in English, we ask Cosials whether she's ever had a similar experience. "Yeah, 100 percent," she enthuses. "I imagine conversations in English, I dream in English. I think one of the best things I understood years ago when we started touring and speaking English almost all the time with everybody, and meeting people and stuff, is that to speak good at a language you have to stop trying to translate it in your brain; you have to start thinking in that language, you know?

"So sometimes that's why it could be so frustrating, because sometimes as I know less words in English... I think my personality in English is still not the personality, or the character, I have in Spanish! Not at all. I have had this conversation with people from England that we're friends from a while ago, and they say that that really don't matter, like, you don't get only the character from the words that I am choosing, it's the expressions and the way you move your eyes and the whole thing. I used to be very worried about it, I still don't like myself in English that much, you know? Because I cannot choose be the Carlotta that I can in Spanish."