Posted: by The Editor
You wouldn’t know it from the way they play it live, but Los Campesinos! are sick of “You! Me! Dancing!” It’s their signature song for a reason—the lead single from their debut album starts with a two-minute teasing, twinkly instrumental build before exploding into an ecstatic, full-bodied romp that runs on nervous energy. It’s most fans’ introduction into Los Campesinos!’s discography, their breakthrough hit that solidified their indie darling status back in ‘08 and has persisted through beer commercials and curated playlists for awkward teenage crushes ever since. By now, the Wales-based group knows it like the back of their weathered hands.
“I desperately want to drop it [from the setlist], because it’s so long. We could play like two or three other songs instead,” frontman Gareth Paisey confesses to me. We’re sitting in the green room on the second floor of Portland’s Aladdin Theater on a sweltering late-June afternoon. We can hear a Dua Lipa song playing down the hallway, muffled enough through the walls that the recording doesn’t pick it up.
Guitarist Tom Bromley sits next to Gareth on the couch and nods in agreement. “We don’t rehearse [You! Me! Dancing!] because we know it so well, but the reaction live is like, ‘Oh this is why we still play it.’”
When I see them play it just hours later, the band members start off by huddling close around the drum kit, sly smiles on their faces, their heads all bowed as if in prayer or gossip. Or, it’s as if they’re in a huddle discussing strategy, and Gareth, their team captain is about to make everyone put their hands in and shout a final affirmation before they all take to the field to kick some ass. Gareth has compared the camaraderie of a Los Campesinos! show to that of a sporting event, both from the audience and the band’s perspective. We’re all cheering for the same team. A win for them is a win for all of us.
That’s certainly how it feels when the group disperses to start playing the opening notes of “You! Me! Dancing!” We’re almost at the end of their set and we all knew it was coming, but we’re still surprised and delighted to fall in love with this band all over again. They get it. “We’re people-pleasers,” Gareth says, letting out a sheepish, good-natured laugh. “Plus it’s a good song to play for the boyfriend you dragged along.” (When I relay this to my boyfriend/plus-one, a casual fan whose favorite LC’ song *is* “You! Me! Dancing!”, he replies with a resounding “Let’s fucking go!” They really know their audience.)
Hearing Los Campesinos! talk about and later play “You! Me! Dancing!” makes me think of Hanif Abdurraqib’s essay “Carly Rae Jepsen Loves You Back,” specifically when he gets to the part of her concert where she plays “Call Me Maybe”: “When I see her play a sold-out show at New York’s Terminal 5, no one is suffering through all the other songs in order to get to the one they heard on the radio.” He describes Carly’s hit song as “dessert.” The people who go to Carly Rae Jepsen shows are, for the most part, not the people who know her as “the ‘Call Me Maybe’ girl,” but when she tosses her signature song in 3/4s of the way through her setlist, they’re still happy to hear it. Similarly, “You! Me! Dancing!” is not the “real heads” pick for Los Campesinos! fans, but it’s a delicious little treat thrown in towards the end of the night that reminds you that some things are popular because they’re good, even if what’s most popular isn’t your personal favorite.
I recently came across “You! Me! Dancing!” on an algorithmically-generated “Indie Sleaze” playlist—a movement that LC! were technically adjacent to, and one that they cheekily poke fun at on All Hell’s “Holy Smoke (2005)” (“Nowadays it’s Live Laugh Love and listen to Death From Above”)
“We weren’t cool enough to be invited to their parties,” Tom laughs, “I mean, sometimes we’d get invited to the party, but we weren’t at the after party doing coke with whoever the actually cool bands were.” LC! have been adjacent (and subtly influential) to a variety of subcultures and musical movements through the years—twee, fourth-wave emo, blog rock—though never fully embedded in any of them. They prefer it that way.
“We’ve always been on the periphery,” Tom adds. This jack-of-all-trades, semi-outsider status has made it easier for LC! to shut out the outside noise and passing trends in favor of zeroing in on what their strengths are to try to create the best version of their own sound. Gareth agrees: “It’s cool that we’re a reference point, but we’ve got no interest in being a nostalgia thing.”
For the most part, audience members don’t request “You! Me! Dancing!” anymore, as they know the band is gonna play it at some point in the night, although that doesn’t mean it never happens. “There was a gig not too long ago where, three songs in, someone shouted for “You Me Dancing” and I was like “you’ve obviously never written a setlist before,’” Gareth laughs.
Speaking of setlists, I ask Gareth about a recent “controversy”—heavy on the scare quotes because it almost feels too silly to be called a controversy—in which Gareth posted a fake “setlist” on Twitter. “I’ve seen a couple of really cloying bands post their setlist in advance and I’m just like, fucking get over yourselves,” he says, before adding that he was impressed that that post got as much traction as it did (“Jeff Rosenstock retweeted it!”)
It’s clear that this joke was meant to be lighthearted and not at the fans’ expense, as is characteristic of LC!’s rapport with their audience. “It’s always been the case with our fanbase where we poke fun at them a little bit—and it’s mutual,” he clarifies.
It’s Gareth who almost always ends up getting humbled or becoming the butt of a joke. His songwriting tends to reflect that lack of self-seriousness, something he’s come to be more and more aware of as his career has progressed:
“There are lyrics I wouldn’t write now. If I’m talking about a relationship or an ex I wouldn’t be quite as candid, but that’s the nature of developing as a songwriter as well as a person. But I sincerely believe that throughout our whole catalog, the butt of the joke has always been me. I’m always the one I’m portraying to be an asshole or a sucker. That’s always been super important, that I’m not being like ‘this person was awful, it was a terrible relationship because of you,’ it’s always like ‘I’m a loser. I’m gonna boast about something and then crack a joke at my own expense.’ That’s always how it’s been.”
One of the most satisfying things about being a longtime Los Campesinos! listener is following each ongoing series of thematically linked songs dispersed across their discography, each one a pin dropped across a multi-album map. Getting a new State song or Heart Swells song or a new installment in the “Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown” series (All Hell’s final single “kms” is #6). Even hearing the band come together to shout “CAN WE ALL CALM THE FUCK DOWN?” on the All Hell’s manic pop punk standout “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” and instantly recognizing it as an echo of the group-screamed opening line of “This Is A Flag, There Is No Wind” off Romance Is Boring was a thrilling reminder that some things really never change. Sometimes fourteen years go by and you still haven’t learned how to calm the fuck down.
Gareth’s been building each of these themed song collections for most of the group’s career, and was inspired early on by a similar tactic used by John Darnielle. A fan of The Mountain Goats’ “Going To…” songs and Alpha Couple series, Gareth wanted to write in a way that was similarly interactive. Sometimes a song is a standalone story, but other times it’s a chapter in a developing arc. Reopening the door to a past song and using that to expand upon its themes rewards longtime listeners by letting them connect the dots across the band’s timeline.
Los Campesinos! have always been a very referential (often self-referential) band, and All Hell is perhaps their most referential album to date. It’s one that feels like it contains essential pieces of their entire discography. Listening to this album as a longtime fan is like cutting open a tree trunk and counting all its rings, a record of its history visible within.
I perked up when I first heard the references to Silver Jews’ American Water and “Goodness Pt. 1” by The Hotelier on “Feast of Tongues.” They’ve gained a reputation for referencing other musicians in their songs—from Ian MacKaye to Toni Braxton. When I ask about the references, Gareth mainly chalks it up to a growing comfort and familiarity of his own songwriting style. He’s well aware of the tropes that he makes heavy use of, and he leans into writing what he knows and loves. He also mentions that these references have historically been a means of signaling or sparking connection through common interests.
“We’ve always—probably similar to yourself—when you’re a certain type of person you mention these things for validation from like-minded people,” he explains, and for a moment I’m a little taken about by just how accurately he’s read both of us—and to an extent, anyone whose obsessive about their interests to the point that the only way to stop obsession from turning into solipsism is to use it to find your people. I think about how, two years ago, when I moved to a new city where I knew no one, I’d make a point to wear band t-shirts when I went out to bars or coffee shops or concerts alone—because I didn’t have anyone to go with. Someone coming up to me and saying “I love (x) band, too!” wouldn’t guarantee that they’d become my new best friend, but flashing a sign via a band’s t-shirt at or their sticker on my laptop while working at a cafe or complimenting the bartender’s song choice at a local dive was a way of telling the world something about myself in hopes that I might find a way to ground myself in something familiar in an unfamiliar environment. Or maybe it’s just painfully obvious that I’m the kind of person who—often against my better judgment—puts too much personal stock in music as it informs who I am and how I move throughout the world.
Sometimes though, it’s not that deep. Sometimes the references are a way of letting the audience in on a joke. “I like including gags,” Gareth tells me, “Sometimes I’ll feel like it’s really cringey or a really cheap gag, but I try not to police that. If it works, if it makes me laugh, just fucking do it.” Tom backs him up, saying that especially as a band whose material tends to skew pretty dark, it helps to cut the tension with a joke to keep things fun and to remind both the band and the listener not to take themselves too seriously.
This is a key component of Gareth’s persona and stage banter, something he himself admits: “There’s a sort of sparring with the audience where they give us love and then I sort of take the piss out of them.”
I ask about the differences he notices between the American crowds and the UK crowds—if there are any jokes that land better in certain locations, any references that go over Americans’ heads.
The main difference, he tells me, is the many, many UK football references throughout LC!’s catalog. Those tend to get a more fervent response back home, unsurprisingly. “There’ll be a clump of dudes in the middle who’ll lose their shit if I say the name of a specific football player,” Gareth says. That kind of thing doesn’t tend to happen when the band plays stateside.
He admits that the members of Fresh—the London-based pop punk band that’s been opening for them on this tour—like to play up their already-thick British accents for their American audiences. When I ask him about what goes into choosing support acts for LC! shows, he says that the main motivator is picking bands that Los Campesinos! themselves want to see perform live. Watching Fresh rev the audience up with a set of spunky, explosive crowd-pleasers, it’s clear that LC!’s instincts have led them in the right direction.
It’s also become something of a running joke that if a band opens for Los Campesinos!, they’re gonna blow up, often even bigger than LC! themselves—Dev Hynes (pre-Blood Orange), Illuminati Hotties, Titus Andronicus, Two Door Cinema Club, and Vampire Weekend—to name just a handful. One fateful night in Vegas, Los Campesinos even followed a little local band by the name of Imagine Dragons.
I’m incredulous. “No way. You’re fucking joking” Gareth assures me that he is, in fact, not joking.
“They never acknowledged it,” Tom says.
“They never acknowledged it on that night!” Gareth laughs. “We played Beauty Bar in Las Vegas—circa 2010? We literally sold like 17 tickets. And [the promoter was] like ‘There’s this local band that’ve got their EP release tonight. If we put them on the bill they’ll bring 50 friends.’ So this band shows up, they bring 50 friends, they use our amps and our drum kit, they play their set, they leave, all their mates leave, and that was Imagine Dragons.”
Tom nods, “It was a real sliding doors moment for them.”
Back on the subject of UK vs. US crowds, Gareth also says that US audiences are “easier to talk to”—i.e., more easily impressed. “If you say the name of anything in the city they’re in—a bookstore, a restaurant—everyone loses their shit. And I usually call the audience out on it.” Later in the night, I’ll get to see the very phenomenon that Gareth describes play out in front of me, when he tells us how excited the band is to be on tour in the US and, in response to our enthusiastic clapping and hollering, says, “Cheering for the word ‘tour,’ really? Alright.” It’s all in good fun. There’s a general understanding that everyone is in on the joke.
Gareth also tells me that he’s genuinely surprised at things like American fans showing up in UK football jerseys or singing along to lines about hating Tories, though it’s understandable—especially with the latter. We’ve got our own American equivalences, and the ideas expressed tend to transcend the specificities. The band and their fans seem to be in agreement that it’s all one struggle.
Los Campesinos! have never been a capital-P political band, but they’re a band where, if you listen to their music and pay at least a little attention to their public identity, it’s easy to figure out what they’re about. They’ve always been outspoken about being anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, anti-police, and have routinely put money towards charities that align with those values—including partnerships with Trans Lifeline, National Network of Abortion Funds, and even offering to contribute to the union fees of UK workers during a 2020 transport strike. They’ve amassed a largely LGBTQ fanbase and in an effort to make their live performances more accessible, exclusively play venues that have gender neutral bathrooms and are ADA compliant and all-ages. They also set aside 10% of their tickets to be sold at discounted prices to ensure that fans from lower-income backgrounds can afford them. Onstage with them are two black-and-white pennants—the one hanging from Kim Paisey’s keyboard reads “FREEDOM FOR PALESTINE. END THE OCCUPATION. STOP THE GENOCIDE.” Another one draped over one of their amps reads “SAFETY, DIGNITY, & HEALTHCARE FOR ALL TRANS PEOPLE.”
All Hell is their most overtly political album thus far. While explaining its title to the audience that night, Gareth says, “It’s called All Hell because, well—look around.” There are a few songs from it that the band hasn’t debuted live yet. Like “Long Throes,” which just might be Los Campesinos!’s most straightforward protest song, one that takes aim at warmed-over liberalism and the secondhand embarrassment that comes from watching aging punks throw away their once-promising politics as they get older and richer:
The punks on the playlist are crooning for kindness / Asking “why can’t we just get along?” / Me and my friends are sadists, backbreakers for spineless / Wish ‘em dead and then we’ll put it in a song / Capital don’t care, we’re eating at the trough / I’d like to teach the world to scream at all of the above / Anxieties and maladies and falling out of love
That last two lines sum up most LC! Songs, and the ones on All Hell are no different, with political unease baked into everyday emotional turmoil, often coming to a head in moments where Gareth confronts his own identity and legacy as a working musician. On the snotty, self-aware “Holy Smoke (2005),” he describes himself as “walking dead at 37” after expressing mixed feelings about seeing his friends become parents—“Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends’ kids / sure they’ll grow to be good leftists / bet they’ll make their parents proud make the best of what they’re left with / But they don’t buy the beers I drink / and they don’t drink the beers I buy.” Some of the kids in question have grown up on the road with LC!—keyboardist, co-vocalist, and Gareth’s sister Kim and her husband Jason Adelina (the band’s drummer) have two young children who’ve come on every tour since they were born. At a few points during the interview, I can hear the two of them running through the halls of the Aladdin Theater, and while onstage, Gareth thanks his wife for her work as their caretaker, and mentions that the two of them are sleeping on the band’s tour bus.
The crowd sings along to “Feast Of Tongues,” knowing every word despite the track only being about a month old. At the defiant chorus, the air fills with shaking fists, everyone roaring along “When the blackout comes, if one flame flickers / we will feast on the tongues of the last bootlickers”—as Gareth had promised earlier. “When we were writing that song I never saw that as a fists-in-the-air chanting moment, but every night it has been.”
On All Hell’s opener, titled “Coin-Op Guillotine” he laments “So how does it seem like I’ve been coping? / My brain is fried and my spirit’s broken / Working for the coin-op guillotine / If you’ve got a cross to bear / call my name, I’ll see you there” It’s such a classic LC! move, to start off with what seems like a pity-party of one and then invite the audience to join in. The vibe is not “I feel like shit and no one understands,” it’s “come on, let’s all feel like shit together.”
On the single “0898 HEARTACHE,” Gareth’s class consciousness stems from the precarity of his career. It’s one of my very specific favorite categories of song—one in which the singer directly addresses the act of making music as though they’re singing about a lover. I think of song like “Geyser,” the opener off of Mitski’s Be The Cowboy, which sounds like a love song to a person, but is actually about how she’s made a lifelong commitment to being a musician, and how her tumultuous, passionate relationship to her craft is the one that’s stuck with her through everything else. Or Lucy Dacus’ “Night Shift,” which is about a breakup in a literal sense, but at the bridge—“You’ve got a 9 to 5 so I’ll take the night shift / and I’ll never see you again if I can help it / In five years I hope the songs feel like covers / Dedicated to new lovers”—transcends the boundaries of a failed relationship and becomes a song about throwing oneself into an unconventional career path and the joys of creating something mutable and timeless.
“Dial 0989 HEARTACHE / If your calling me’s a mistake, then tell me why we’re both still on the line,” Gareth sings, reminding himself why he’s still doing what he’s been doing for all these years—and reminding the audience why we’re still listening.
All Hell is out everywhere July 19th.
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Grace Robins-Somerville | @grace_roso
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