Interview Los Campesinos!: “We’ve never wanted to be a legacy act or a nostalgia thing”

“We’re an anomaly in terms of how people respond to us, and it’s really nice to feel like we occupy a space that isn’t within the music industry proper but is something that we’ve curated ourselves over time,” Gareth suggests. “Every time we come into a new project that we’re doing, be it a record or a reissue or a live show, we always think maybe we’ve gone too far. But then the kindness we get back from our audience is like… shit, maybe we can keep pushing it.”

As conversations rage on around the viability of a career in music for anyone not operating in the major label-backed top tier (Los Camp!, Gareth notes, do not even take their Spotify earnings into consideration as an income source; “When it comes through every couple of months it’s like, ‘Oh great, we can have a nice meal out with that’”), the band have taken steps to put some power back in the hands of themselves and the people that actually give a shit. ‘All Hell’ will be self-released on their new label Heart Swells; the band, meanwhile, are aiming to do everything as ‘direct to fans’ as they possibly can – circumventing the usual protocol and announcing and dropping everything via their newsletter first, relying on old-fashioned fan power and word of mouth. As a recent email missive states: “We’re fed up of being dictated to by billion dollar platforms and a messed-up algorithm.”

It might seem revolutionary in 2024, but if anything it’s a return to the fan club mentality of a pre-social media age. “Everything is art against the algorithm these days – you’re trying to cut through with the positive stuff you want to give to people, but you’re at the mercy of big business,” Gareth says. “Whereas what works for us is fostering this community and saying, ‘If you like us, tell your mates. Send them a playlist of your favourite LC! songs. Buy an extra ticket to the gig and say, ‘You’re coming with me’. That’s the way we’ve continued to grow and it finds us somehow in a situation where we’re more popular than we ever have been since the start.”

On both tracks, Gareth’s vocals are used in new, more traditionally ‘singer-y’ ways that he attributes to bandmate and producer Tom Bromley pushing him – or, rather, pulling him back. “It’s my instinct in the studio to sing like I sing live, and live there’s an element of having to carry the show. When I’m on stage, I am the most important person in the room at that point and that’s an egotistical thing to say but it’s the truth and I acknowledge that,” he chuckles. “But in the studio this time, I tried not to think in that way and when I was singing more quietly – which is probably just at a normal volume rather than shouting – it really did allow me to sing ‘properly’. A few fans were asking, ‘When did Gareth learn to sing?’ I’ve always been able to sing, I was in the school choir! I’ve just never really needed to before.”

Still “always in each others’ lives” despite not having written together for the best part of a decade, ‘All Hell’ doesn’t sound like a band forcibly re-oiling the machine as much as just hopping back on it. The point of view is different, older – as it only ever could be – but the rallying chemistry is still fully present and correct. “It doesn’t feel like coming back, it feels like we finally got round to doing the recording part of being mates,” Gareth says. Part of the reason it took so long, then, was more down to their perception of the world and their place within it.

“I think there was probably an element of not really knowing what the need was for us. We’ve never wanted to be a legacy act or a nostalgia thing; we turn down quite a lot of festivals that are clearly booking us in that way because we don’t feel like that and we don’t want to be perceived as that,” he continues. “But then seeing how we’ve been an influence to [newer] bands made me realise that there’s not really anyone that does what we do. The music we make has always been uncool, but it’s big in scope and we’ve never really changed in that respect. I feel like there’s a real space for us and we’ve perfected what we’re doing now.”

As a lyricist who happily states that he “never writes for fun” (“These are the first songs I’ve written in six years,” he shrugs), these moments of levity became an integral tool within a record that often found itself rooted in the sort of heaviness that you might expect from an album entitled ‘All Hell’. Acutely aware of his own privilege as a “white, cis-gendered man who is straight, who lives a comfortable life and has a house, is fine for money”, Gareth found himself writing still-personally but also about the world at large; of this hellish dystopia on earth.

“It’s a very insular record as always, it’s a record that’s about the experience of being me, but more broadly it’s about living through this modern time where the world is awful, we’re all depressed, we’re all uncertain about our futures and the future of the world,” he says. “But within that we continue to exist and live our lives, and that’s what the album is rooted in. The first line of the album is about pooling all your pennies and the last line is about finding two pound coins. There’s a lot of cause in the record for solidarity and working with each other against the evils of the world, and the fact that those pools of pennies have become pound coins by the end is perhaps a glimmer of hope.”

Indeed, there’s much hope to be gleaned from Los Campesinos! right now. That they’ve made a long-awaited new album that many thought might never appear; that a band who’ve never had their ‘objective commercial moment’ can still go from strength to strength; that they’re trying to change the game to bring it back to them and the fans. Gareth, however, also has another hope…

“OK, what we actually need is: Tories out, then England LOSE the Euro’s final which makes people angry and they channel their rage into applying pressure towards the new Labour government, and then the LC! album comes out which really blows a fire underneath it all,” he decides, returning to his big July plans with a grin. “Then the revolution comes – and THAT’S the Los Campesinos! three-point plan for a socialist utopia.” Seems easy when you put it like that.

‘All Hell’ is out 19th July via Heart Swells.

Tags: Features, Interviews, From The Magazine, June 2024, Los Campesinos!