The marvellous universe of Los Campesinos!

From the barriers back, the dance floor in front of the stage was packed full of young fans, teens and twenty-somethings, but there was no viral TikTok hit to thank. It wasn’t a reunion, or a farewell. “It was fucking nuts,” says singer Gareth Paisey.

Formed in Cardiff in 2006 while studying at university, Los Campesinos! blew up in a rush of angular guitar-pop and message-board twee. Signing with tastemaker label Wichita Recordings, they released their saccharine debut, Hold on Now, Youngster... in 2008. A crush of devoted lyricism, niche indie references and violent guitar lines, it captured the equal abandon and despair of young adulthood.

Over the years the band and its lineup evolved, eschewing their cardigan-pop and boy/girl vocals for a darker, direct narrative and richer musicality. Third album Romance Is Boring was an opaque and enveloping coming-of-age, while its follow up, 2011’s Hello Sadness, laid bare the kind of foundation-shaking break-up that can only unfold from the drama of your mid-twenties.

They invested in building a core and devoted fanbase, as the key tenets of Los Camp! lore were founded; football, politics and pessimism. Their shows became part-concert, part-catharsis, their curated merch lines; collectors items. They practised what they preached, canvassing for the Labour party during the Corbyn years, covering professional union fees for fans during Covid, and establishing all-gender bathrooms at every show.

Standing in front of three-thousand fervent fans on that Saturday night in February, Paisey announced there was a new Los Campesinos! album on the way. It was an electric moment. “It felt like it could have been a full stop on something, and maybe going into the gig some people may have thought it was, but in reality it was a continuation and a start-over in that, this is us, this is where we're at, we're not going anywhere,” he says. “It was an incredible, incredible occasion.”

There’s a reason why a group of part-timers who sing about obscure Irish footballers from the ‘90s can become more than your ex-girlfriend’s favourite band. It all comes down to humble authenticity. With Los Campesinos! there’s no posturing or pomp. In their songs, at their shows and through their politics, they are painfully real and relatable. It’s strangely refreshing, to pull at a thread and find it doesn’t unravel. The enduring, and growing appeal of the UK’s premier emo threat is that they are genuine, and that’s a sentiment that echoes through All Hell.

Mixed into the wordplay and alliteration, Paisey has a sharp talent for positioning the micro against the macro. In the greater context of climate collapse, the rise of the far-right and overseas genocide, genuine hell, the embarrassing truth is that the type of things we agonise over are sent memes and emoji reactions. “I get tired of musicians just speaking in these super broad terms, writing great songs and with great sentiment, but not really saying anything,” he says. “It's not to say what I'm doing is good or bad one way or the other, but it's real and it's authentic. It's meant to be this wide-screen view of the world but also with a huge amount of attention on the things that we experience daily and don't pay much attention to, or maybe that we obsess over.”

Talking to me the day before the band flies to the US for a mostly sold-out tour, Paisey is joined by guitarist Tom Bromley. The creative force behind all of the band's sonic output, the pair split writing duties as Bromley composes the music. Over the years, he’s expanded his aptitude as a commercial composer, a touring member of Perfume Genius’ band, and as a producer for hire. Having worked alongside longtime collaborator John Goodmanson on previous Los Campesinos! records as co-producer, on All Hell he took the reins.

In the ranks of Los Campesinos! is original guitarist Neil Turner; joining around the Romance Is Boring release, drummer Jason Adelinia, who previously worked as their tour manager, Gareth’s sister Kim on keys and flute, and multi-instrumentalist Rob Taylor whose previous project Sparky Deathcap recently went viral resulting in a deal with Sony Music. Bassist Matt Fidler, who joined ten years ago after playing in several other Cardiff bands, completes the lineup.

Taylor is also responsible for the band’s distinctive aesthetic, his designs forming an accompanying narrative across their merch, album covers and tour posters, as core to the group as their music. Tying together key lyrics, football references, political ideology and quintessential Budweiser in-jokes with his easily recognisable hand, it adds another layer to the complex universe growing around the band.

In a recent mailout to fans, Paisey wrote, “I’m reluctant to get carried away, but this is somehow looking likely to be our best selling record ever.” For a band that’s self-managed and self-releasing through their own Heart Swells imprint, that’s a phenomenal achievement. The last Los Campesinos! record, Sick Scenes, was released over seven years ago. Since then, the band have celebrated the anniversaries of several records, released a compilation and EP, and performed their, now somewhat traditional, annual London headliners. It may not have been a hiatus, but it felt painfully indefinite.

So, what made them start writing again? “We ran out of things to reissue,” jokes Bromley. “We never planned to stop or take a break, and I don't think anything triggered us wanting to suddenly release a new record. We'd had conversations from 2019, we've been talking about it for that long. Other than the pandemic, the only thing that really held us back was ourselves and just committing to it. I think we took our time about it deliberately. We definitely didn't rush anything.”

The most logical moment for the band to step forwards with new material came after their double-header of Romance Is Boring anniversary shows in London, around Valentine’s Day 2020. But famously, the world had other plans. “Covid hit, obviously, and I think that there was a sense of a little bit of defeatism in, how are we meant to do a record?” says Paisey. “Personally, there was a period of time where it was like, what the fuck am I meant to write about? Who cares what I think or what I have to say? I was hyper-aware that I am a white cisgender straight male, who we hear far too much from, and it's like, how can I say anything that is worthwhile? I think that held me back for a while, and I guess being a white cisgender straight male my ego got the better of me and I decided I should just do it anyway.”

Bromley began methodically working on demos towards the end of the pandemic, only sharing them once he was happy. Paisey’s approach to writing is notoriously different. “I need pressure and I need panic, that's the only thing that motivates me,” he says. “But I made a conscious effort to work on some stuff and a couple of songs were finished earlier than others and then tweaked later in the studio.”

A game of cat and mouse grew between the pair, Bromley not wanting to book in studio time until the demos had come together, Paisey needing the threat of a date to inspire his creativity. But there was more to it than work ethic. “When I'm at home and I've got my cat on my lap and I'm watching Love Island, trading cups of tea with my wife, that's not songwriter mode for me. That is not me being the front person of a band,” he says. “I need to be in the studio and surrounded by this noise and feel like I am Gareth from Los Campesinos!”

There’s a cohesive thread that runs through All Hell, through the guitar-rich orchestrations, dense ensemble arrangements and attentive dynamics. Both sonically and lyrically, the songs tie together, the album’s narrative led by extended outros and distilled interludes. The penultimate line of album closer, “Adult Acne Stigmata” (“My eyes shine like two pound coins I found upon the pool table rail”) loops back to the first lines of album opener, “The Coin-Op Guillotine” (“Hypnic jerk, and I’m woken from a dream. We were pooling pennies for the coin-op guillotine”).

“I always like to, best I can, have an important and an impactful opening line to the record. I think I have since ‘Ways to Make It Through the Wall,’ having, ‘I think it's fair to say that I chose hopelessness,’ which was a reference back to a lyric from ‘My Year in Lists.’ I really love that,” says Paisey. “We were able to stick with that and I could make the link between the first lyric of track one being about pooling all our pennies for the coin-op guillotine and then the last idea of the album being finding two-hundred pennies on a pool table.”

The final line of the record inspired its title, “You’re so beautiful, the sky is blue, but we both know too well, it’s All Hell.” “It's a simple pleasure, but that to me is impactful and is perfect. Even the way that the final instrumental line doesn't really resolve,” Paisey says.

The opening sound of the album and its closing dissolve are the cut-up loop of a piano, sampled by Bromley and also included in the opening to recent single “Feast of Tongues.” “There's a thing that Trent Reznor did in the score for The Social Network where he just does a little piano thing, and that’s kind of the mnemonic of the film,” explains Bromley. “Throughout the film, as they're getting further from their ideals, the same piano note gets played with more reverb on it and it becomes more and more distant.”

The closest relation from the Los Campesinos! back-catalogue to All Hell is likely Romance Is Boring, a record that required listener investment, but has paid back as an enduring gem. “The way we recorded this time was most similar to how we did Romance Is Boring, in that we did a stint, went away for a bit, and then did a bit more. Then in this occasion we did even more,” says Paisey. “I think the depth of the album, through the musical interludes or the intros and outros, or just the textures and the detail within the songs, that's something that I'd say Tom's probably wanted and been capable of doing on previous records, but just never had the time. That, I think, was a big part of making it the success that we feel it is.”

Recorded between Frome and Cardiff, across three separate sessions, the band took their time to get things exactly as they wanted, without rushing or self-imposing obsolete deadlines. “Rather than forcing ourselves to finish, we were like, it's ready when it's ready, and it's ready when it's good and we're happy with it,” says Bromley. “That was a unique experience for us. That was the defining feature of this album.”

Having built an unbreakable trust across two decades of friendship, Paisey and Bromley left each other to work independently on the record in the time between sessions. Without the constraints of a label, it allowed them complete autonomy over the album’s path. “Usually there's one or two songs on the record that, even if outwardly people don't notice, I know that, ‘Hang on Gareth, this is your leftover lyrics that you put together to make a song now,’” Paisey says. “But on this record that didn't need to happen. I was still doing it right until the night before, but after we made that initial decision in the first three weeks that we weren't going to rush it, I felt in control.”

Having that flexibility also allowed the inclusion of late-comer “kms,” now one of the group’s favourite moments on the album. With Paisey’s sister Kim taking over lead vocals, it marks a moment of reprieve in the later stages of the record, albeit with the same hopeless undertones the band have built a career on. “That's the Los Campesinos! way, these contradictions and dichotomies,” Paisey smiles. “Lyrically it's painting three separate, reasonably desolate scenes. I like building small scenes within songs and across albums and I really like the simplicity in the chorus. ‘I would lay down my life for any rat in the road, yeh I’d lay down my life for you.’ It's fun. Then me, coming in to ruin it by singing the bridge, making my grand entrance.”

While the song helps curb the album’s dynamics, it also gave the group something fresh to play with after months of intense work on the existing tracks. The chance to platform Kim’s vocals offered both a sonic and emotionally-driven opportunity. “We all love Kim dearly. She's incredible and she's such an amazing presence within the band and it's really nice for her to have her moment front and centre because a lot of the work that she does, I think it doesn't get noticed enough by fans,” says Paisey. “People often say she's the backing singer, when she's so much more than that both musically and in the context of what she is in the band. So for her to have a song which is hers was super important to us. I think it's a really important song within the album.”

Perhaps as a welcome distraction from the final stages of All Hell’s production, the track was completed in record speed. “That happened naturally and without me forcing myself, and that's the best way I think,” Paisey says. “So ‘kms’ is ‘Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #6,’ but it's not included in the title. As we talk about the lore and world-building, that's something that fans will be very, very excited about, I think.”

The world around Los Campesinos! is one that’s intricate, clever, and gleefully indulgent. Lyrics call-back to past lyrics, titles take on their own culture, and songs subtly pair with past releases. That’s all before unpacking the puns, wordplay and deeply personal references that litter the lyrics. It’s impressively clever, but also full of humour, some dark, some wonderfully silly. The comedy within the Los Campesinos! catalogue is something they don’t get enough credit for. “It genuinely blows my mind,” says Bromley. “Even stuff later on, there’ll be a pun or a bit of wordplay or a reference that I’ll suddenly get or Gareth will explain it in an interview and I’ll be like… fuck. The most obvious ones, he’ll come rushing out and be like, ‘did you get the CSS lyric?’ Just so fucking pleased with himself he can’t help but point out the dumb pun.”

The line in question, from “Holy Smoke (2005)” holds the past to the present, singing, “Nowadays it’s Live Laugh Love and listen to Death From Above.” It’s a work of tongue-in-cheek genius. “A lot of people will hear that lyric and think that is a fucking awful lyric and I don't necessarily disagree,” laughs Paisey. “I think sometimes when writing, lyrics reveal themselves that just demand to be included and it's not necessarily up to me as the author to even make a decision otherwise. It's a punchline, and not a lot of bands do that. They might put a funny noise in a song or a non-sequitur that is kooky or whatever, but this is a stupid gag in a song, but it has to be there. It’s integral to the full lyricism of the album, and so I'm glad that people are clocking it and laughing at it.”

The track itself is a direct relation of Sick Scenes’ opener “Renato Dall’Ara (2008)” which includes the Interpol riff, “Stella's a lager, and boy she is always downed.” While Los Campesinos! shirk the suggestion of being a nostalgia act, so much of their music is steeped in the sepia of their formative years. “It's a song that’s set in Cardiff Barfly, I guess. It's sticky floors, it's double-mixer for a quid-fifty, that's what it's meant to be. That's what the first verse is and then the second verse is bemoaning that it's not like it was anymore,” Paisey says.

“I love easter-eggs like that,” says Paisey. “That’s a song where there's a little bit of a musing on how we’re viewed by our new fan base, the expectations that we have around us, and the way that I find that the younger fans are both extremely deferential whilst also being absolute dickheads to us. They think we're great and they're so nice to us, but also never before have our appearances been scrutinised more. So that's what the second verse is getting at, and how it's really difficult to place yourself within that when you’re in your late thirties writing these songs that people like, and there are seventeen-year-old kids on the internet making up weird nicknames for you. That's the ‘This Is a Flag’ call-back. I'm not even saying ‘please’ anymore in my request to calm the fuck down.”

The opening line, “‘Entry of the Gladiators’ tinnitus plays in my skull,” references the song that was used by the Romans to commence a duel. A clip of it plays, subtly pitched-down, in the track’s outro. “When that was written, it was a tune that was used for gladiators entering the arena. So it was this big, grand, foreboding, moments-before-extreme-violence tune, but it became known as ‘The Clown Song’ and you can't think of it as anything else,” explains Paisey.

“Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” ends with a lyrical gag too, “That’s what they mean when they proclaim the boy’s a lyre,” which, rather brilliantly, only makes sense when you read the lyrics. The song also showcases how Paisey pushes the boundaries of his narratives, crossing personal experience with exaggerated creative licence, the second verse a violent rumination on bitter rivalry. “I feel like these days there's a reluctance to allow people to play characters within songs. I think there's an expectation that everything that is said in a song is being said by the individual who is singing, rather than this sort of narrator role,” he explains. “I reference Nick Cave a lot and he's obviously somebody who can form all these different roles within his songs. That middle section of ‘Clown Blood’ was meant to be that.”

Paisey’s lyrics mark an interesting dichotomy, as so much that makes his words resonate widely is how intimately personal they can feel. Perhaps it’s an influence from his enduring love of The Beautiful South, but he shines a light on the most mundane minutiae of life, making it feel impactful and unifying. “I think there are so many great bands that trade in more general sentiment and ideas, and that's great, but I'm not able to do that. I go the other direction and go as detailed and as personal as I can. I think that's why a lot of people connect with the lyrics,” he says. “When I'm writing, I'm continuing to build that world and there are constant references back to other songs and in the future I'm sure there will be songs that reference things from this album. I kind of imagine it in this world which is growing outwards but also growing upwards at the same time.”

Another element of the band's appeal stems from their personal and deep-rooted music fandom. From the very start of the band, their Myspace blogs would open and close with lyrics from the likes of Why? and Wolf Parade. When they toured the US in 2009, they collected 7”s from the bands they played with, including the likes of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone, Lovvers and Xiu Xiu, handing the records away in a well-publicised competition. Guitarist Neil Turner co-ran a club night in Cardiff called Punks in the Beerlight in homage to the Silver Jews track. Even to this day, that passion and pride is still present. They purposefully pick and champion their support acts on tour. The single art for “Feast of Tongues” lifts the horizon from Silver Jews’ wonderful American Water, the track name-checking the record, “Time will come when we know that we oughta, drive to the horizon of American Water.”

“That was obviously showing off about how interesting our music taste was,” laughs Paisey. “But this is a great thing in how our fan-base has been nurtured, people do love that. They love our recommendations. If I shout out a band or we put a playlist together, it's great because we're music fans. We all identify as music fans and if we can share music we love with other people then that's only a positive thing.”

Originally there was an element of indie-snobbery to how Los Campesinos! presented, but over time it’s softened. That said, there’s still the odd swipe at unnamed peers on All Hell. On “Long Throes” Paisey jibes, “The punks on the playlist are crooning for kindness, asking. ‘Why can’t we all just get along?’” It doesn’t take a genius to connect the dots. “I have issues with posturing and with empty gestures and with watered down activism as marketing, I suppose. Fifteen years ago, I would absolutely be naming names, whereas these days I feel like it's not the way to do things,” he says. “The punks on the playlist line (I suppose that's two Silver Jews references on the same album then, which if I had realised at the time, I probably would have had to remove one) it's a game we played for a bit. But the clamour for playlisting and for thanking billion-dollar streaming platforms for including you on a playlist, I know why it's done, but to me it's the most demeaning and depressing side of being in a band.”

With All Hell, it’s a concern they’ve been able to step back from, being completely self-managed and self-released, as well as not relying on the band as their main source of income. “I think the thing we've done with this record that is probably most similar to Romance Is Boring, and I don't know if I'm reevaluating my own version of the past, but I think this is us at our most insular and self-indulgent and certainly not looking outwardly in terms of commercial success,” says Bromley. “When we were doing it full-time, whether we wanted to admit it or not, I think it's always there. What you're writing is helping you survive and it's your job. So there's always a certain amount of commercial pressure and that is completely non-existent now. I think that, in a way more than you realise, frees you up.”

Without outside pressure, the band were able to be as insular and self-indulgent as they wanted on All Hell, reflecting their world within the walls of the record while continuing to feed the mythology that surrounds them. “The more insular we are and the more we trust our instincts, the more things connect with people. I think that has become our guiding principle, just to follow our guts,” says Bromley. “What would we like as listeners, as concert goers? What would we like to see? Just doing all those things.”

It’s echoed in All Hell’s construction, with sounds and textures interwoven to include the familial experience of making the album. Across the record, songs play out with the atmosphere of a closing door, the sound of a child, or laughter. “I wanted the record to capture other elements of our lives and the people that're a big part of it, and just celebrating elements of that,” says Bromley. “Throughout the recording process I would make voice memos of people when they were in fairly unguarded moments. I’ve got this Shazam-for-birds app called Merlin. Throughout winter, me and my partner would go on evening walks. It was completely dark and we heard owls. Ten seconds later this huge tree literally collapsed and there was this enormous noise and the whole thing was recorded on Merlin. It made such a great sound that I used that as part of a crescendo to one of the songs. Just little moments like that, snippets of our lives. I wanted it to be a celebration of us as a band and little things for us to hear and be like, ‘I know what that was, I know who that is, what that moment was.’”

Part of the reason for preserving such elements of life in the record might also stem from the sheer amount that Bromley committed to it. For a period of time, All Hell was his life. “To me, there's something really nice about us being a gang that does everything ourselves and does everything the way we want it to be. That extends to the production as well. I can't emphasise enough just how much of a difference it made with Tom. I appreciate it took over Tom's life, but the record is so much better for that,” says Paisey. “For Tom to have been able to really look at the nuance of every single song and every single detail within it, it’s turned the record from what would already have been a great record, to what is now to me, a really exceptional album. It's a whole piece. It's something that to me demands to be listened to in full, and that is because of the huge amount of work that Tom put into making it work from beginning to end.”

Announcing All Hell at London’s Troxy in February, Los Campesinos! led with early single “A Psychic Wound,” its explosive energy and intrinsic melody a direct continuation of the emo-bombast of Sick Scenes. “I think it was the perfect song for us to play at Troxy because it's a big dumb rock song,” says Paisey. “It's direct, it's got fantastic hooks, it's got great moments in it. It has got that typical LC! vocal style and lots of references, lots of words crammed in at a great speed, but I think it also shows how capable we are as a band now at writing these big, anthemic songs, so it was a perfect one to go with.

Alongside the kind of stark and introspective references that make the band's writing so addictively rich, gags like, “Do you still have that one tattoo? That’s how it works, of course you do,” there’s also a nod to catholicism, with religious imagery appearing more across All Hell than any previous record. It’s even in the title. “Religious imagery is such a bounty in that there's so much good, interesting imagery and so many ways to relate it to multiple other things. It's a bit of a lazy trick, using religious imagery, but it usually works and it is very evocative,” explains Paisey. “‘Psychic Wound’ is just meant to be a song about drifting in and out of daydreams and buried trauma and stress and worry, all in this backdrop of life being this capitalist hellscape that you're stuck within and there's nothing you can do about it. It's a song that's about nothing and about everything in the same time. I think it’s the case in a lot of our lyrics where, this is just existing. This is what it's like to exist and like to live and these are the things that you notice and that you think about.”

Released in close tandem with “Feast of Tongues,” the latter is an antidote to “Psychic Wounds’” bullishness. A slow-build brooding pulse of capacious production that eschews expectation, it lifts Paisey’s vocals into a crush of full-throttle anthemics. For Bromley, it forced a balancing act. “However much time I spend on my part of things, the centrepiece to our records and the core personality of the band is Gareth. So I'm building a platform for him to sing from,” he says. “Sometimes it's quite hard to do that because I'll have the music for a long time and I want to hit a certain spot emotionally before there are vocals, so I'll keep adding things to it. I have to be disciplined and remind myself that there's still this centrepiece to come, and to not overdo that.”

As the production grows and Paisey’s vocals carry, it’s the drums on “Feast of Tongues” that keep the burgeoning chaos in check. “Jason really hated recording this one because he struggles to see the architecture of the song or what it will be, so he was blindly playing these drums for quite a while without cues,” laughs Bromley. “He’s an incredible drummer and so knowing what he can do, sometimes I have to be like, ‘What's the most Jason fill you could do here?’ He'll do it and I'll be like, ‘No - more! Be more of a prick!’ The challenge with this song was that I wanted it to go big without it sounding cheesy, so the drums played a big part. We made the snare pattern slightly stranger. It's sort of threes and so it doesn't reset over the end of the phrase, it kind of carries on lurching forward. This one as well, I didn't want it to feel like a guitar solo. I just wanted it to be a wall of noise.”

Bromley’s experienced hand also shines through on juggernaut “To Hell in a Handjob,” an angular rift of foreboding restraint that finally breaks in the middle-eight. “I suppose it's a songwriting trick. I actually used it before on ‘Ways to Make It Through the Wall,’ essentially avoiding that chord that feels like home throughout the verse and the chorus and then it gets to that break and then it goes to the one, so that there's just this moment where all of a sudden it feels like ta-da!” he says. “At the same time, there’s dynamically a bunch of things coming in, all the big noise. Holding back, up until that point, and then suddenly letting that happen.” The track also features former Yellow Ostrich saxophonist John Natchez who plays with The War on Drugs.

There is one piece of instrumentation, on album opener “The Coin-Op Guillotine,” that’s likely to bring a smile to any longtime followers of Los Campesinos!; the glockenspiel. “Gotta give the people what they want, Tom,” laughs Paisey.

“I've always liked the glockenspiel. For me, it's from a post-rock kind of thing, like Mogwai,” Bromley says. “I think we moved away from it because I guess we felt so ridiculous playing it, or it became associated with twee. There's something it does in that frequency range that I just really like the sound of, and honestly, that is the guiding principle for the music. It's just like, what sounds good?”

All Hell is the sound of a band unified and liberated, the close bond between Paisey and Bromley allowing them to explore and push boundaries with confidence. As sonically and lyrically weighted as it is, it holds the euphoria of a group of friends indulging in creative camaraderie. As penultimate track and recent single “0898 HEARTACHE” deals a culminating onslaught of finite adrenaline, album closer “Adult Acne Stigmata” offers a footnote of hope. “It’s kind of like a coda. Where you have a big finishing track like ‘0898,’ it wouldn't feel right to end on,” says Bromley. “I don't see how anyone could particularly make an escapist or positive record at the moment, and it actually has ended up with more hope and positivity than I expected, which is a great thing, but it always felt like it needed a very sort of raw moment at the end.”

As rich and rewarding as All Hell is, it’s by no means an easy or instant listen. Unpacking the layers and letting them sink in requires devotion. Thankfully, that’s a culture that Los Campesinos! have cultivated through their tenacious authenticity and integrity over nearly twenty-years as a band. Returning after seven with no management or label, they find themselves faced with a dedicated and growing fan-base. Much like Paisey once sang, “Absence makes the heart grow fonder, fondness makes the absence longer.”

“I suppose it's a sense of authenticity that maybe a lot of bands lose when they get sucked into the music industry proper. We were once a part of that. That is a lot less satisfying than the way that we're doing it now. It feels authentic,” says Paisey. “It feels so much more rewarding and it's nice having that ability to feel like you're at one with your fans. We've always tried to avoid any sense of hierarchy between us and our fans, that's always been important to us. I think we're in a position now where we're able to do that even more.”

As long as football teams lose, politicians lie, and hearts are broken, the Los Campesinos! universe will continue to expand.