Hinds
I Don’t Run
MOM+POP
7/10
Madrid garage-rock four-piece Hinds has had an incredible couple of years. Thanks to the success of their 2016 debut, Leave Me Alone, they’ve toured the world, becoming festival staples in the process. Last year, they hit the road with Chicago’s Twin Peaks, fellow purveyors of the best kind of rough-around-the-edges, lo-fi guitar-pop. That beloved sound has been elevated on Hinds’ sophomore release, I Don’t Run, which shrugs off any lingering metaphors from the first album and tells it exactly like they lived it.
Hinds created this record with an agenda—theirs, not yours. The chorus of opening track “The Club” goes, “Last night was wrong, I know / You don’t need a lover / But I don’t wanna go.” By the end of the song, “don’t wanna” becomes “not gonna.” They’ve learned a lot since their breakout, resulting in a more confident sound that amplifies what made people love the band in the first place: the near-shouted sing-along choruses, as on “New for You” and “Tester”; the back-and-forth vocals of Ana Perrote and Carlotta Cosials; the thick bass lines and punchy percussion. Gordon Raphael’s production (best known for his work with The Strokes) serves the music well: Everything echoes and reverberates, like a mantra, and it’s louder and prouder than ever.
“I wanna show you it’s cool to grow up,” sings Cosials at the beginning of I Don’t Run. This attitude is echoed in the album’s title. Hinds is not afraid of a mess. They’ve worked hard and they’ve made mistakes—two sides of the same coin, since up until recently, they’ve exhausted themselves by taking every tour date offered to them—and they stand behind all of it. On “Rookie,” they sing, “If you’re doing it wrong, do it strong.” Turns out this philosophy makes for an album that’s entirely the latter.
