With fourth album Hello Sadness (released November 2011 on Wichita) confirming them as one of the UK’s best-loved indie bands, Cardiff’s Los Campesinos! are set to release Songs About Your Girlfriend as a single. Before its 19 March release, a video for the chunky-riffed, euphoric track will debut, aptly enough, on Valentine’s Day. Pay attention before directing a loved one to it: the song has lethal lyrical barbs. “It’s an ode to every person you have ever, or will ever lay your dirty hands upon, to let them know they’ll never do any better or worse than you,” say the band.
Songs About Your Girlfriend is a neat phrase for the entire Hello Sadness album. Recorded in Girona, Spain, Hello Sadness is ten songs of love, loss and heartbreak nail-gunned to a back-drop of broken, tangled bodies, creeping, dead-eyed animals, suffocating, looming shadows and World Cup exits. It is an honest, bare-bones documentation of breaking up and trying not to break up in the process. At just ten songs and 40 minutes, Hello Sadness is perhaps the first Los Campesinos! album that sounds lean and pruned, indulgence shorn away and filler ruthlessly excised. The youngsters that made debut You! Me! Dancing! are long gone. The band they’ve grown into, though, are something to fall for all over again.
A thrilling live band, Los Campesinos! will be heading out on a UK tour to coincide with the single release. Dates are as follows…
Tue 20 Mar – Exeter, Phoenix
Wed 21 Mar – Bristol, Thekla
Thu 22 Mar – London, Electric Ballroom
Fri 23 Mar – Oxford, O2 Academy2
Sat 24 Mar – Birmingham, Rainbow Warehouse
Mon 26 Mar – Manchester, Academy 3
Tue 27 Mar – Liverpool, O2 Academy2
Wed 28 Mar – Edinburgh, Cabaret Voltaire
Thu 29 Mar – Newcastle, O2 Academy2
Fri 30 Mar – Norwich, Waterfront
Sat 31 Mar – Sheffield, Leadmill
