HINDS

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Most Spanish bands don’t leave Spain, Ana García Perrote, the cofounder of Hinds, says over Skype on a quiet Friday morning from her home in Madrid. In the background, sounds of birds chirping can be heard as a door gently swings open and closes, fleeting moments of calm that come spliced amidst a streak of festivals, photoshoots, music videos, and interviews. Perrote points out that, having been on the road since November, home in Madrid doesn’t feel quite like home anymore. This may be because Hinds is not following the typical trajectory associated with Spanish bands. In usual circumstances, bands comprised of mostly boys will cut their teeth playing gigs in various cities across Spain every Friday night. In unusual cases, successful bands will become big in South America because of the shared language and they might “randomly have fans in Japan,” because of the internet. As a Spanish band, Hinds is unconventional considering their gender and international reach. They have become the first all-girl band from Spain to sell out shows worldwide, their success almost instantaneous, playing their fifth-ever gig in Berlin and their twentieth on stage supporting the Libertines at Le Zenith, one of the largest venues in Paris. After a ten-day respite, the girls are gearing up to return to life on the road, with sets at Bonnaroo and Glastonbury, as well as an appearance on the Colbert Show, in their immediate future.

Perrote, who sings and plays guitar in Hinds, explains that she and cofounder Carlotta Cosials have never been properly taught to do anything in music. Perrote was attending school for PR and business while Cosials studied drama when they met. Cosials began dating one of Perrote’s close friends, who happened to be in a band with Perrote’s boyfriend at the time. There wasn’t a lot of music in the area where they grew up, so they often found themselves attending their boyfriends’s band practice and shows. After two years, Cosials and her boyfriend split, and she and Perrote decided to take the classic beach trip to get away and forget. When they arrived, with no internet connection, away from everyone they knew, boredom kicked in. The stimulation they craved was found in music.

The girls decided to play guitar. Perrote, only knowing three chords, began covering “Eating Me” by Bob Dylan. They switched back and forth on the vocals and guitar, sometimes singing over each other, sometimes not singing at all. Perrote, laughing, discloses their method as it happened: “Like, you’re gonna shut up and now I’m gonna pick it and now you’re gonna scream!” At that moment, Perrote and Cosials were no longer spectators. “It wasn’t like someone was telling us, ‘No, you can’t play this guitar,’ it’s just we never saw any girls doing it,” Perrote explains. “We just thought it wasn’t a thing. We didn’t feel any less or ashamed, but we were like, ‘Why would I pick the guitar if he plays way better than me?’ and suddenly when we were both of us in a place absolutely not having any idea about singing or playing, we felt super free with no judgements. We weren’t ashamed of anything. That’s how we started to feel free.”

During their first couple months of playing together (when they were named Deers before a lawsuit forced a name change), Perrote and Cosials wrote and recorded jaunty tracks “Trippy Gum” and “Bamboo.” The original version of “Bamboo,” which was recorded in only four hours in their rehearsal room, can be found on their full-length album Leave Me Alone, which came out earlier this year. The demo tracks gained attention much faster than the pair could have ever anticipated. In order to keep up they would need a full band, and Perrote recounts that from the very beginning they knew they wanted to be a four-piece, all-girl band, but didn’t know how to go about it because all the musicians they knew were men. In Spain, sexism remains prevalent, and the pair feared that if they introduced male band members, they would no longer feel like equals. The notion that fans would believe they were merely the pretty faces fronting the band instead of the ones writing the songs and calling the shots drove them to search for like-minded girls. Perrote stumbled upon drummer Amber Grimbergen through Facebook—she was a fan who happened to reblog a photo of theirs. Perrote recalls that all it took was seeing Grimbergen’s profile picture of her playing drums and she knew “that was it.” A week later, they met and Grimbergen joined the band. To complete the four piece, they convinced their friend Ade Martín, who had been their “tour manager” (although she didn’t even have a license to drive), to play bass for just one gig. Dozens of concerts later, Martín shows no sign of leaving the band. The girls are strong strategists; remaining in control of every aspect of their career, they have the final say over all social media, music videos, shows, and press. They design and sell their own merch, and Perrote says that they work very hard to remain hands on.

Their album Leave Me Alone is the musical embodiment of girls who are sick of being left on the sidelines. It demands energy and attention. The songs jump up and down as two Spanglish voices collide over pumping rhythms. With lines about shitty boyfriends, getting too drunk, and maybe falling for someone new, the emotional rollercoaster of being a young woman is passed off to the listener much like it’s experienced. Leave Me Alone exudes the feeling of being all over the place and struggling to find control while still having fun. Perrote says this sound was born by way of intuition. For Hinds, making music is a series of trials and errors, and they are never quite sure where the song is going to end up. Without proper musical instruction, there are no scales to rely on or methods to follow, and everything comes directly from the heart and from the ears. Perrote acknowledges that “you don’t have to be Bob Dylan to write songs, you can be a human being just writing about how your girlfriend left you.”

Perrote finds herself in awe of their present circumstance. “We were students,” she recalls of their beginnings not so long ago. “It was Carolita and I at her place trying to write the songs we would like to hear because we’ve always been music lovers and we had no idea how to play with a pick, no idea how to play standing up, or to play electric guitars.” Yet Hinds is not another pastiche garage rock band. Though they harness the ability to maintain an energetically untamed atmosphere, they are also capable of interplay. Differentiating themselves from bands like Ty Segall and the Black Lips, they deliver an easy sense of femininity.

As in all facets of their performance, Perrote says that the band’s look is also of a piece with their larger project. She explains that, even though they have made the decision as a band to dress kind of like boys, imitating the bands they liked by wearing oversized and possibly dirty t-shirts, “I still need to feel like I’m a girl at some point, so it happened kind of through the lipstick. It’s so easy cause it’s so small and you can carry it and you can share it, so we always had a little lipstick on. So I’m wearing this big tee but, ‘Hey, I have lips, I’m a girl.’”

As girls, they have had a much harder time gaining acceptance and have had to continuously prove themselves. However, with perseverance, their musical prowess and popularity are flourishing. In the midst of the daily chaos that comes from being on the road, the girls of Hinds find themselves itching to seriously begin their second album. Perrote says that it will be similar to Leave Me Alone since they don’t want to radically change and “suddenly add a lot of synths,” for example. The sophomore album will be tighter than the first because they have greater knowledge of their instruments and have also learned the important skill of navigating a recording studio. As Perrote explains, all Hinds needs now is time to relax, have a few beers, stir up a flow of creativity, and get to writing.

Hinds performs a DJ set tonight at House of Vans, Brooklyn. They perform June 26 at Glastonbury Festival.