“It’s with regret I am succumbing to nostalgia,” goes one of the more pointed lines on All Hell, the seventh album from Los Campesinos! Just moments later, frontman Gareth David likens himself to Orpheus, the bard known in Greek mythology for his ability to enchant anyone and anything with his music before he was killed and his body and lyre were thrown into the river. “I admit it takes one to know one,” David adds, picturing himself watching the prophet’s head bob along the water.
The macabre has always been a major force in the music of Los Campesinos! They proclaimed as much 16 years ago, when their debut album Hold On Now, Youngster… opened with the frenetic, deceptively peppy “Death To Los Campesinos!” Back then, the Welsh indie-pop band had just recently formed at Cardiff University. All seven members adopted the surname “Campesinos!” – a Spanish word translating to “peasant” – as their stage names, exclamation point included. Some of their earliest releases boasted cutesy covers of Pavement, Black Flag, and twee pioneers Heavenly, but they’d go on to write and record one of the greatest emo songs of all time. For a while there, you could’ve argued that nostalgia was what kept the Los Campesinos! ship afloat. But then they just kept sailing.
All Hell is the first new Los Campesinos! album in seven years, which feels like millennia in Los Campesinos! time – for reference, they dropped their first four albums in under four years. In the time since 2017’s Sick Scenes, they said goodbye to their longtime label Wichita and the exclamation-marked stage names. But, much to the relief of the generation who downloaded Hold On Now, Youngster… to their first iPod, much has remained the same. “It’s only been with the last couple of records in the last few years where we realized that this is actually something that can carry on for as long as we want to do it now,” guitarist and producer Tom Bromley has said, and that sense of freedom imbues All Hell with a sharp authenticity that brings to light exactly why Los Campesinos! have withstood the test of time.
One of Los Campesinos!’s many strong suits is David’s lyrics, and All Hell boasts about seven years’ worth of his best zingers. If that Orpheus anecdote didn’t already make it obvious, there are a few spiritual references here – a guardian angel bored to death on the job, a foreboding lone tarot card that’s weaseled its way in to a poker hand – but the record is still heavily rooted in the pitfalls of reality. All Hell is unabashedly of the moment, working in buzzy phrases like “affiliate link,” “live laugh love,” and a phonetically-pronounced “ACAB” that instantly define the era. But David’s concerns go beyond the insular: “Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends’ kids/ Sure they’ll grow to be good leftists,” he sings on the adrenaline-fueled “Holy Smoke (2005),” later lamenting his “no children and no profession, walking dead at 37.” Over the mathy drums of “Long Throes,” he ponders: “Do you tire of excuses that you make for your parents?/ How ‘they worked hard for their money’ for your future inheritance.” It’s the type of lingo that could easily become too on-the-nose, but David’s keen observations on intergenerational dynamics make it feel immediate and essential instead of cloying.
With Bromley at the production helm, All Hell also sees Los Campesinos! expand on the more daring sound they introduced on their 2011 album No Blues and continued with Sick Scenes. All Hell is the most polished Los Campesinos! LP yet – the instrumentals are meticulously performed, and David’s voice has never sounded smoother – but it’s still saturated with an undeniable elan. Throughout the album, Bromley samples the sound of a falling tree, distant laughter, a closing door, and a cut-up piano loop inspired by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ The Social Network score, all of which help to bring the entire project to life. Even at its quietest moments – like the subtle mid-album interlude “II. Music for Aerial Toll House” – All Hell is dynamic and relentlessly passionate.
All Hell seems to embrace every iteration of Los Campesinos! across their impressive evolution, but re-contextualizes those elements in a way that feels natural before tipping into the overly sentimental. The title of the hushed, folksy number “I. Spit; Or, A Bite Mark In The Shape Of The Sunflower State” is an obvious nod to “A Heat Rash In The Shape Of The Show Me State” and “A Burn Scar In The Shape Of The Sooner State” from their 2010 album Romance Is Boring. The group-chanted “Can we all calm the fuck down?” on the raging “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” is uncannily similar to the opening lines of Romance Is Boring’s “This Is A Flag. There Is No Wind.” But sonically, one of the more notable self-references comes on the sweeping, grandiose album opener “The Coin-Op Guillotine.” It prominently features a sparkling glockenspiel riff, a staple of early Los Campesinos! at their most twee that Bromley has since re-defined as “a post-rock kind of thing” inspired by bands like Mogwai. “There’s something [the glockenspiel] does in that frequency range that I just really like the sound of, and honestly, that is the guiding principle for the music,” he’s explained. “It’s just like, what sounds good?” That acute awareness of what sounds most appealing is part of what has helped Los Campesinos! achieve the near-impossible: Nodding to the past, looking towards the future, keeping their feet firmly planted in the present.
All Hell is the sound of a band who’ve spent nearly 20 years cultivating their own distinct identity, and it’s that genuine sense of themselves that’s made Los Campesinos! so enduring. There’s one lyric in particular on “Long Throes” that feels like the band’s entire MO crystallized: “I’d like to teach the world to scream at all of the above/ Anxieties and maladies and falling out of love.” It’s not that any one of those woes is greater than another, but that each one is worth feeling to the fullest degree.
All Hell is out 7/19 via Los Campesinos!’s own Heart Swells.
Other albums of note out this week:
• Denzel Curry’s King Of The Mischievous South Vol. 2
• Childish Gambino’s Bando Stone & The New World
• Dr. Dog’s Dr. Dog
• Major Murphy’s Fallout
• Heart’s =1
• Robin Guthrie’s Atlas EP
• L.C. Franke’s Still In Bloom
• NEWSBOYs’ Worldwide Revival (Part I)
• Saosin’s Live From The Garden Amphitheater
• Glass Animals’ I LOVE YOU SO F***ING MUCH
• Gorgon City’s Reverie
• Beachwood Sparks’ Across The River Of Stars
• Coastal Club’s All Of The Things You Said EP
• Bizhiki’s Unbound
• GUM & Ambrose Kenny-Smith’s Ill Times
• Mary Ocher’s Your Guide To Revolution
• Dhruv’s Private Blizzard
• Sham Family’s A Deaf Portrait Of Peace
• Griff’s vertigo
• Soft Play’s Heavy Jelly
• Up Around The Sun’s Tower Of The Young Sun
• Oneida’s Expensive Air
• Dhruv’s Private Blizzard
• Highly Suspect’s As Above, So Below
• Various Artists’ Twisters: The Album
• Kiely Connell’s My Own Company
• Tanner Porter’s One Was Gleaming
• Shugo Tokumaru’s Song Symbiosis
• Eliza & The Delusionals’ Make It Feel Like The Garden
• Luke Temple & The Cascading Moms’ Certain Limitations
• Carson McHone’s ODES EP
• Oruã’s Passe
• Imogen And The Knife’s Some Kind Of Love EP
• Nate Terepka’s Not Yet
• WAR’s The World Is A Ghetto: 50th Anniversary Collector’s Edition (Expanded Box Set)
• The Raveonettes’ Sing…
• Ashton Irwin’s Blood On The Drums
• BLK ODYSSY’s 1-800-FANTASY
• United Freedom Collective’s UHURU EP
• Richard Sen’s India Man
• Elori Saxl’s Drifts And Surfaces
• WORSHIPPER’s One Way Trip
• Luca Eck’s CONSUMED EP
• Flat Black’s DARK SIDE OF THE BRAIN
• Lilacs & Champagne’s Fantasy World
• Jimin’s Muse
• AJ Lee & Blue Summit’s City Of Glass
• Krypticy’s The Non-Return
• Calling All Captains’ (e)motion Sickness EP
• Scree’s Live At The Owl Music Parlor Volume 2 Mini Album
• Ivan Cornejo’s Mirada
• Stray Kids’ ATE Mini Album
• Mourning [A] BLKstar’s Ancient//Future
• Orange Goblin’s Science, Not Fiction
• Brutalismus 3000’s GOODBYE SALÓ EP
• Only Twin’s It Feels Nice To Burn
• Mexican Coke’s Mexican Coke
• Lava La Rue’s STARFACE
• Rae Isla’s New Frontier
• Amindi’s Luvr EP
• Blxst’s I’ll Always Come Find You
• Barns Courtney’s Supernatural
• JT’s City Cinderella Mixtape
• JB Dunckel’s Möbius Morphosis
• Excel’s Seeking Refuge
• Chow Lee’s Sex Drive
• Hippo Campus’ Flood
• Emile Mosseri & Sam Gendel’s Hardy Boys
• Adam Lambert’s AFTERS EP
• NCT 127’s Walk
