Just days after Los Campesinos! announced All Hell, their first new album in seven years, the Welsh seven-piece put out a second single from it. ‘Feast of Tongues’ and ‘A Psychic Wound’ didn’t serve as a one-two punch so much as a preview of the record’s emotional dynamics, or rather, tonal whiplash: the first turns a single brooding note, a flickering ray of hope, into a fiery anthem about survival, while the latter leverages its explosive hook to bear the universal weight of its lyrics. The cosmic wound may never heal, but Los Campesinos! know what a song can do to treat, however slightly, the bitterness another one has just left in your mouth. For longtime fans of the UK’s self-proclaimed “first and only emo band,” it is a familiar spiral of self-diagnosis and self-medication, and the fact that the group’s seventh LP was also self-produced and self-released may give it the appearance of a rather insular pursuit. “It once was ours but now it’s mine, these things get better over time,” frontman Gareth David sings after a breakdown at the pharmacy, referring to the pain once shared by two people, or maybe more. The irony is not lost on the rest of us who don’t always relate to the second half of that sentence.
All Hell might seem like it was tailormade for fans who have waited long enough for a new record by a band who released their first four albums in under four years, but it’s also for anyone forced to balance their hard-won optimism with a dose of spite and heartbreak. Some of the people the group takes shots at might be considered peers: ‘Long Throes’ sneers at “the punks on the playlist are crooning for kindness,” while ‘Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head’ has some strong words, calling straight back to Romance Is Boring’s ‘This Is a Flag. There Is No Wind’, for the parasocially attached end of the band’s younger fanbase: “Can we all calm the fuck down?” Whatever distance these jabs create, however, serve to amplify the true backbone of this band, what really unites them against “endless nothing” and capital – not streams, idolatry, or broad political gesturing, but faithful commiseration. On the first preview of the record, David states it outright: “If laughter’s the medicine we need, then this misery is therapy.” This might as well be ours.
Where other punks measure their worth in mantras, Los Campesinos! deal in punchlines. David’s wordplay is as sharp as ever, and the album’s refined production only helps his jokes and cavalcade of references land. But chuckle as you might to lines about a thousand “emoji reacted” memes and some old radio playing “your first kiss (later than your friends did),” his humour never undercuts the genuine heaviness, yearning, and beauty of his lyrics, the qualities that really shine through over the album’s outsized, sweeping, and dynamic arrangements; from the blistering ‘Holy Smoke (2005)’ to ‘The Order of the Seasons’, which accentuates the signature build of a Los Campesinos! song – even if the climb is only preparing for the fall – with gentle strings, backing vocals, and relentless drums. They may not be the kind of band that preaches tenderness, but it’s there in those subtle details, atmospheric interludes, and unexpected moments like ‘kms’, a refreshingly off-the-cuff tune featuring lead vocals by David’s sister Kim.
When David regretfully admits to “succumbing to nostalgia” on ‘Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head’, he could be pointing to the prevailing sentiment on ‘kms’ or any number of songs on All Hell. But if the past looms large on these songs, it’s only to illuminate the band’s enduring sense of purpose, which he explicitly lays out on ‘Long Throes’: “I’d like to teach the world to scream at all of the above/ Anxieties and maladies and falling out of love.” All Hell drifts in and out if these predicaments like it does between dreams and wakefulness, foreboding memories and present woes. And if it serves as a pure distillation of everything that makes Los Campesinos! unique, its self-referential nature does little to keep new and curious listeners out the door. As someone who didn’t hold a deep investment in the band’s previous output and dug through their entire discography in the lead-up to All Hell, this is the album that naturally scans as their most significant. But it doesn’t take a lot of effort to reach that conclusion, and you don’t need to cross-reference the band’s records to understand their impact or duality. You can listen to a couple, or just one, of their songs; if you happen to identify a little too well, then it’s for you.
