AYESHA RASCOE, HOST:
We reached out the other day to a musical duo from Madrid.
ANA PERROTE: Hello. It's a pleasure to be here.
CARLOTTA COSIALS: (Speaking Spanish).
RASCOE: That's Carlotta Cosials and Ana Perrote. And together, they are the Spanish rock band Hinds. And in their new album, "Viva Hinds," they are kind of introducing themselves.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HI, HOW ARE YOU?")
HINDS: (Singing) Hi. How are you? I was feeling that the room was painted blue, like a very cold November day. But hey, we're in June.
RASCOE: Perrote told me, the last few years for her and CC (ph), as she calls her bandmate, have not gone to plan.
PERROTE: Oh, my God. It wasn't up to us. I promise you, Ayesha. It really wasn't.
RASCOE: Their tour was canceled during COVID. Two band members quit, and Hinds lost their record deal.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "HI, HOW ARE YOU?")
HINDS: (Singing) Hey, you OK? I've been better, TBH. Why do you care? Are you waiting for...
RASCOE: Despite it all, Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials managed to stay together and put out this new album, and they credit their bond for holding them together.
COSIALS: I think it's impossible to understand Hinds without counting on that we are two best friends. The friendship came first, and then we ended up coming up with music. That is the thing that we both love the most. So I think it's impossible to take out of the equation the friendship because it's one of the key values of this band and this project.
(SOUNDBITE OF HINDS SONG, "HI, HOW ARE YOU?)
RASCOE: Is there a song that you feel like really showcases friendship on the album? - 'cause it seems like it's such a big part of this.
COSIALS: Oh, yeah. I think maybe "On My Own."
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ON MY OWN")
HINDS: (Singing) It really wasn't a good time. It was so hard to hear you say you're in love. You're sitting down...
COSIALS: The musical moment that there is in that song - we've done for the first time, like, conversations between the keyboards and the guitar.
(SOUNDBITE OF HINDS SONG, "ON MY OWN")
COSIALS: And same as when we chat in Spanish - sometimes, we interrupt each other, and we finishes each other's lines. We tried to replicate that in our instruments. You really can tell it's done by Hinds, I would say.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "ON MY OWN")
HINDS: (Vocalizing).
RASCOE: What do you think it's like to write about romantic love versus platonic friendship love?
PERROTE: The thing is, I think it's good that we're a couple of friends writing about love. We have a pretty specific and weird way of writing. We don't each write our own parts and then sing in - to each other. We just sit down as friends having coffee and doing a catch-up, and then we pick up the subject. And by talking about it, then we put it into words together, and then we split the melodies and who's going to sing what.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COFFEE")
HINDS: (Singing) I like black coffee and cigarettes.
PERROTE: The result is special, and it helps with not being so - to be honest, to not be so self-centered. I think it helps a lot to have a good friend next to you seeing the other side.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "COFFEE")
HINDS: (Singing) I like black coffee and cigarettes.
PERROTE: Even though maybe I haven't lived whatever CC is telling me and whatever we're talking about in that song, I have some feelings that connect to that with another past experience, even if it's not specifically what we're writing about. You always see the other side of things.
RASCOE: Do you guys have any disagreements? And what do you do when you disagree?
COSIALS: Ooh. Of course, we do.
PERROTE: But...
COSIALS: We beat each other up until someone wins.
(LAUGHTER)
COSIALS: See you in the finish line, Ana.
PERROTE: We're quite good at handling disagreements 'cause, obviously, we've been doing this for 10 years. And the greatest thing about working together is that we respect each other so much, and we admire each other so much, and we tell each other every day. We just know each other so well, too, that we know when something is more important for me than for CC, for example.
And then we have this thing - we call it, like, OK, we don't agree, so convince me. Like, pitch this idea to me. So the other one sits back and just listens, and the - and one pulls out the PowerPoint and starts saying all of the points on why this should be done that way or whatever. If you really fully trust the other person, you know it's going to be a good decision, anyway.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BOOM BOOM BACK")
HINDS: (Singing) The boom boom back.
(Singing) Once upon a time in the middle of an XL lie, faking laughs, melted ice, throwing dollars and dice.
BECK: (Singing) Do you want to step aside a hologram of your life?
HINDS AND BECK: (Singing) Life is waiting in the middle of an XL lie.
RASCOE: And that last voice is obviously not either of yours. It's Beck. Did you write this song, "Boom Boom Back," with Beck's voice in mind?
COSIALS: No because the song was written before we met Beck, but it all happened in the same week. We were in LA. We were - after a couple of shows. And we bumped into him in a bar and talked to him, and we started to get along really well. And he invited us to another thing, so for the whole week, suddenly, we became, like, very good friends. This can be a little bit embarrassing. But we were so proud that we wrote that tune, and we were so pumped with it. We thought we had, like, something really good in between our hand. So we actually asked him, would you like to hear what we're working on? And he said, yeah, sure. So we played it actually with a phone, and he loved it.
RASCOE: So it's kind of like you became friends with Beck like you two are friends.
COSIALS: Yeah.
PERROTE: Yeah. We told you, you can't take the friendship out of Hinds.
RASCOE: (Laughter) Yeah, well, exactly.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "BOOM BOOM BACK")
HINDS: (Singing) That feels the boom boom back.
(CROSSTALK)
HINDS: (Singing) The boom boom back.
RASCOE: You could have walked away from your band in 2020 with all the changes going on, but you decided to pivot instead. What did you learn from that experience?
COSIALS: So one of the best things going through this stuff has taught me is not to wait the circumstances around you to be perfect because they're probably never going to be perfect. The moment we stopped waiting, it made us straightforward doers. And this album is definitely - I'm not trying to overthink or overjudge what I'm doing. I'm not even thinking about how it's going to land in the audience or in the people.
PERROTE: The biggest lesson we learned was even if we don't know what we're doing, if everything that we're trying is not really working - we kept waking up every morning, meeting every morning at 10:00 a.m., having a coffee and replanning and replanning and replanning. So the biggest lesson that I learned, at least from this, is something that I'm going to take forever with me. It's not only a music lesson. It's definitely a life lesson that if you have a friend and a vision, just keep going.
RASCOE: That's Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials of Hinds. Their album "Viva Hinds" is out now. Thank you for being with us.
PERROTE: Thank you so much, Ayesha.
COSIALS: (Non-English language spoken).
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "EN FORMA")
HINDS: (Singing in non-English language). Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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