Los Campesinos! stream new track 'Avocado, Baby'

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With fifth record No Blues out later this month, Los Campesinos! have unveiled the album’s second single, ‘Avocado, Baby’, streaming beneath.

Perhaps one of the catchiest, most anthemic pop songs to date from a band whose last LP was entitled Hello Sadness, the track notably features contributions from the Cardiff Cougar Allstars cheer squad.

“I wanted to write playfully and with humour”, lead singer and lyricist Gareth told Best Fit recently, “something which with hindsight was largely missing from Hello Sadness“, citing the “unashamedly funny and entertaining” songwriting of The Beautiful South, Nick Cave and Half Man Half Biscuit as inspiration.

As has always been characteristic of the Cardiff-formed sextet’s approach, though, the humour lies in its wry juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy. With the cheerleaders’ peppy chants actually concerning “a heart of stone, rind so tough it’s crazy”, there’s still a hymn-like exaltation in misery reminiscent of the build-up on the last album’s title track, as though welcoming sadness as something inevitable and familiar.

“My demeanour is a melancholy one, I think – I’m just wired that way”, Gareth explains, but insists “there’s a lot of hope in there”. And laden with funeral imagery and mentions of friends known to “crack from love’s weight” as it may be – all pop music is about sex and death, he says – there does seem to be an oddly reassuring positivity to the “It won’t get better, that doesn’t mean it’s gonna get any worse” mantra.

“The melancholy’s still there”, Gareth concludes, “but with the disclaimer of ‘you’ve gotta laugh, haven’t you?’”.

Listen to ‘Avocado, Baby’ below. No Blues drops 28 October, with pre-orders ongoing here.

Los Campesions! play the following live dates:

December
5 Clwb Ifor Bach, Cardiff (w/Playlounge)
6 Cockpit, Leeds (w/ Joanna Gruesome)
7 Queens Social Club, Sheffield (w/Joanna Gruesome)
8 Gorilla, Manchester (w/Joanna Gruesome)
9 Heaven, London (w/Joanna Gruesome)

Tickets are available now.