Now we’re really cooking. To follow Feast of Tongues and A Psychic Wound, here’s 0898 HEARTACHE, the third single from our forthcoming album, All Hell.

STREAM ‘0898 HEARTACHE’ NOW

Gareth says: “0898 is a lovelorn, head-down sprint from limbo into oblivion. A song about negotiating with Mother Nature, drinking yourself blind-drunk, and breaking loaded silences with pointed questions on a long-distance call to everyone you ever knew”

Tom says: “The music was written late 2020, while probably feeling sorry for myself about a Christmas alone. I think the initial ideas for this were the result of the heightened emotional state we’d all been in after that year. I know Gareth always likes a little extra space in a song to allow him to develop his ideas in more detail, so this was an attempt at a longer, more patient track, a build and burst scaffold for him to scream from the top of”

Grace Robins-Somerville writes on 0898 HEARTACHE: “Call me if you want a bad time” could very well be Los Campesinos!’s motto. Sad-sack self pitying is a staple of Gareth’s songwriting, though never in a way that feels solipsistic. This is a band that understands just how deeply misery loves company. Instead of burrowing inward, Campesinos!-brand melancholia is communal, even celebratory. Cynical quips are cordial invitations to a party where the theme is feeling like shit. 

Doomed romance is hardly unfamiliar territory for LC!, but on 0898 HEARTACHE, the third single from their seventh record, All Hell, the love-and-death dichotomy speaks to the personification of the nebulousness of a musician’s relationship to their career as much as it does to a lover. Jittery guitars and cymbals fade in on an established artist contending with the arc of their life and their career. Time lapses slowly and invisibly until the past catches up with the present all at once, making itself unignorable. “There’s no Runners Up Hall Of Fame,” Gareth remarks in a characteristically tongue-in-cheek one liner shrouding embarrassingly true desire. 0898 HEARTACHE makes the humiliation of caring about your own legacy feel like drunk dialling an ex, stupidly high risk with a tiny sliver of potential for reward: “If your calling me’s a mistake, then tell me why we’re both still on the line?”. It’s a worn-down renewal of vows, a conscious sacrifice of dignity in exchange for momentary understanding, a reluctant pledge of loyalty to longshot odds — ’til death do us part”

PRE-ORDER ALL HELL NOW