“Are you getting a massage?” Carlotta Cosials asks. “We should, baby! It’s Hinds band, baby!”
It’s spring in midtown Manhattan, and I’m at a nail salon with the most joyful duo in indie rock. Cosials is sitting in a pedicure chair on one side of me, while her bandmate, Ana Perrote, is on the other. Their trip got off to a rocky start yesterday, when their bags went missing and they were stuck at JFK until 3 a.m. “New York is like a crucible,” Cosials says. “It either breaks you or it makes you.” Perrote chimes in: “It’s breaking me right now.”
Considering that mishap — and the fact that the Madrid band just completed 18 shows in a single week — a massage is definitely warranted. Fifteen of those performances took place at this year’s South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, often with several crammed into a single day. But Cosials and Perrote’s energy never wavered, and they expertly masked their exhaustion with jubilant dances, serious guitar shredding, and hilarious commentary. The last part of which, they prove within minutes at the salon, is not a performance shtick. These women are a really, really fun hang.
Cosials: This fashion trend of pop artists having very, very long nails? I thought, “You’re making your life so difficult. You cannot play guitar. You cannot plant a tree.”
Perrote: You never know when you’re going to plant a tree.
Cosials and Perrote are here to discuss their new album, Viva Hinds, out Sept. 6 via Lucky Number. Like that long night at JFK, there were a few hurdles they had to overcome first, enough to warrant a whole year of massages. Their bassist and drummer both quit, they parted ways with their management and label, and — like many young bands — they struggled financially in the pandemic. For the first time since they formed over a decade ago, Hinds contemplated calling it quits.
“We were very tested on how much we wanted to carry on and why,” Perrote says. “We just looked at each other and were like, ‘Look, nothing else can go wrong. So let’s just do what we can with what we have. Let’s stop waiting for things to change and get easier, because it’s clearly not going to get easier.’ As soon as we had that mindset, things started happening.”
Adds Cosials: “The big story behind the album is, we just have to do it. It’s more like an instinct. We have to release music, or we’re gonna disappear.”
But right now, Hinds are focused on some self-care. Cosials settles on clear polish for her hands and feet, while Perrote is going with a sleek black. Their look is impeccably cool, with Perrote wearing celestial earrings and a lavender mesh long-sleeve, and Cosials in a red hoodie and white pants. They style themselves on tour, with Cosials often wearing tennis skirts.
“Sometimes I accidentally get shy onstage, and I hate when it happens,” Cosials admits. “Because you’re already in front of a lot of people dressed like that … with that fucking ponytail!”
HINDS DESCRIBE THEMSELVES as “millionaires in friendship,” but the duo are more like sisters, finishing each other’s sentences and erupting in bellyaching laughter every few minutes. They rarely spend a day apart (though Perrote notes there was technically “that one Sunday”), and they can’t recall a single fight. If they ever get into a disagreement, they play a game they call “Convince Me” to diffuse the tension, where one tries to convince the other of their argument.
“We really take care of each other and love each other,” Perrote says. “I can tell CC, ‘I need to cancel the biggest show that is gonna make you a millionaire because I am sad,’ and I really think she wouldn’t hate me for that. We both feel like we make something a lot bigger united than separated. Especially being women in music, the world is so tough out there that having each other is important. I think it’s important for girls to see two women working together and being friends and supporting each other. I think it’s beautiful.”
Their unbreakable bond is felt all over Viva Hinds, from the playful, riff-heavy opener “Hi, How Are You” (“I’ve been better tbh,” Cosials sings in response) to the spirited rocker “En Forma,” Hinds’ first song entirely in Spanish. Cosials wrote the track after being broken up with during the week of her 30th birthday. “This guy doesn’t deserve more than one song,” she says. “One is good, but two is obscene.”
But there’s another layer to the track’s meaning. Perrote says it’s essentially about “trying to survive and get through the day” as a woman. “When I’m chatting with my girlfriends, we’re talking about the most superficial, stupid thing, like, ‘Oh, yeah, my nails keep breaking.’ And then you swap to politics and social problems. I just love melting all of those things together. I don’t have that with any guy friends. Not even with my boyfriend.” (When I ask Cosials if she’s currently dating anyone, she smiles wide and says, “I have many boyfriends. Which one do you want to meet?”)
There isn’t a skippable track on Viva Hinds. Each of the 10 songs is a gem in its own right, like the soon-to-be Hinds classic “Superstar” — a raging kiss-off to an egotistical musician back in Madrid — and the summer standout “Boom Boom Back,” which features Beck. They met their hero randomly at a documentary screening in Los Angeles, and on a whim they asked him to collaborate. “We just texted him today asking if he wants to do a Taco Tuesday,” Perrote says.
The band originally envisioned “Superstar” as their lead single, but their team urged them to preview the new record with “Coffee” instead, which they released in February. It’s a simple, sugary track, paired with a video that featured Cosials and Perrote’s real-life brothers. “I like black coffee and cigarettes,” they sing. “And flowers from boys that I’m not sleeping with.”
“It’s not so brainy,” Perrote says. “‘I like black coffee and cigarettes.’ Can you be more honest than that? We’re on 10 years as a band now, and we want to prove that [we’re] interesting and deep. Because there are a lot of layers of Hinds, we’re not just fun and games. But we realized that we don’t need to prove it. We don’t need to be showing the depth and layers. If you see them, you see them. Actually, this is something that we don’t like about other bands: Stop playing it cool.”
“Stop trying to be more interesting!” Cosials adds. “It’s fine with what you are!”
They cut Viva Hinds last summer over the course of two trips to rural France, recording out of two Airbnbs. They stuffed equipment and several rugs in Cosials’ mom’s old van — dubbed the Death Wagon — and drove from Madrid. (It was this very van that Cosials and Perrote took to the coast of Spain in 2011, when they vacationed in Dénia and decided to form Hinds.)
Recording in the relaxing countryside was a much-needed change for the band. Their previous album, 2020’s Prettiest Curse, came together in a studio in New York, which they recall as expensive and anxiety-inducing. It proved a fitting album title, given the dark spell that followed.
“Our management was really struggling to find us a record deal, and we had already spent all of our savings because of Covid, so we didn’t really have any money,” Perrote says. “So obviously that made us finish with that manager. We decided, ‘Let’s just get a fresh look at everything.’” They went without a team for two months — a period Cosials jokingly calls “Carlotta Productions” — until they found a good fit.
Then, in December 2022, bassist Ade Martin and drummer Amber Grimbergen announced their departure at a band meeting. Cosials remembers arriving and feeling optimistic, sipping a beer and ready to get to work. “We thought we were meeting to organize and reconnect,” she says. Perrote also recalls feeling motivated: “It was like, ‘We need to start working on the new album! What music have you been listening to? What should we do? Should we go somewhere to write?’ It was the biggest fail we’ve ever had.”
Perrote thinks back to that moment now, sitting in the pedicure chair while her black polish is applied. “To be fair, it was very hard,” she says. “Anyone that is a musician who was impacted by Covid …. for a long period of time, it just gets exhausting. Being in a band is no joke, especially our size — where there’s a big volume of work and not a lot of things in return, apart from the happiness that it brings us. We knew that it was worth it, no matter what.”
Hinds assembled a new touring band the following spring, when they opened for Coldplay for two nights in Barcelona in May 2023. “You don’t say no to Coldplay,” Perrote says. They sat down with drummer María Lázaro and bassist Paula Ruiz to ask if they would do the gig. “After it happened, they both told us we were close to saying no,” Perrote says. “Just because of how petrified they were, being in front of 50,000 people [for] two nights. They were scared, but honestly, they are so punk. I can’t believe it — they’re so Hinds. Like, if we had a school or if we were a culture, they’ve been there all these years.”
The title Viva Hinds signifies a full-circle moment for the duo, who first formed under the name Deers and were forced to change it after another band of the same name threatened legal action. Cosials and Perrote didn’t love their new name, and fans began to chant “¡Viva Hinds!” to show their support.
All these years later, during this time of struggle, those same words were repeated by their loved ones. “We’re used to hearing it onstage, and this time it was our really close friends and family saying it,” Perrote says. “[Who] have been there no matter what, seeing us cry, day after day, offering help, money, anything they had. It’s a perfect title.”
We’re sitting at the manicure bar now, as Perrote’s hands dry and Cosials finally gets that massage. “For us, music wasn’t a phase,” Cosials says. “Music belongs to our souls and our bones and our personality and our passion. And we don’t get tired of it. We just did 18 fucking shows!”
