Achieving coolness in the traditional sense was never the main goal for Los Campesinos!, but in 2023, its members are fully embracing shamelessness. When Gareth and Tom open their respective webcams on an evening Zoom call, Gareth immediately clocks a certain name on his bandmate’s wall behind him. “I’ve reached the age where I’m not embarrassed to have our own posters in the background,” Tom says with an ear-to-ear grin, referring to a framed horizontal Los Campesinos! banner commemorating a pair of New York City concerts they once played. A decade ago, the band likely hadn’t found that sense of self-acceptance.

In 2013, Los Campesinos! were about to release their fifth studio album NO BLUES, though they felt a bit like the odds were against them; clashing over business matters with their record label and management at the time, the band went into the new album cycle with the understanding that NO BLUES would mark a stark new period for them, for better or for worse. “I do see it as quite a transitional album in that it was where we kind of realised that the industry had given up on us,” Gareth says.

Still, the band took off to record NO BLUES at a studio in a sleepy North Wales town, surrounded by little more than a pub they’d soon frequent and a Tesco Express. Even the album’s title feels like a direct paradox of its predecessor Hello Sadness, almost as if to clear themselves of any expectations in case their fear of disappointing their entire fanbase came true. “I remember it was a period of personal anxiety,” Tom recalls. “And I would say that the industry giving up on us was probably justified given that we’d sort of proven ourselves as commercial failures, but I think we were feeling a bit alone.”

Feeling rushed, Los Campesinos! recorded the album in just three weeks: “It very much felt like, ‘get on with it, and you’ll get a record,’ and then we were kind of done,” Gareth says. “The album was released with no real promotion.”

It’s ironic that NO BLUES never quite got the radioplay or the touring schedule it deserved, because in many ways, it might be Los Campesinos!’s sharpest record. It opens with a one-two punch of two of the most absolutely massive songs in their catalog: the victorious call to arms For Flotsam and the defiant anthem What Death Leaves Behind. The album encompasses songs that could easily fill arenas – the same ones inhabited by the football teams Gareth frequently salutes to in his lyrics – but the band’s immeasurable wit ensured that they were never batting out of their league. After all, who else could proclaim they have a “heart of stone, rind so tough, it’s crazy/ That’s why they call me the avocado, baby” on an album that shares a title with a Miles Davis standard and actually pull it off?

As Los Campesinos! approach the 10-year anniversary of NO BLUES, they seem ready to reflect on the album in a positive light. “Whenever I think about this record, I dwell on missed opportunities from the time,” Gareth says. “Which is a real shame because this is my favorite Los Camp! album and I think it’s our best. And I’m hopeful that sort of celebrating this 10-year anniversary, and people responding to it, will perhaps change my perception of that time a little bit.”

Was there ever a moment you thought this might be the last Los Campesinos! album?  

G: Not NO BLUES. I think if there was a question mark, it was Hello Sadness, mostly because that’s when the record label sort of made it clear that they were kind of done, whereas NO BLUES felt defiant of that, and like we were reclaiming our ownership of the band.

T: I think with every record we’ve made, there’s always the sense that it could be the last. It’s only been with the last couple of records in the last few years where we realized that this is actually something that can carry on for as long as we want to do it now, because we’re not fully financially reliant on it. But I think this was the first record where we knew it would be the last one we’d probably be making as a full time band.

What do you remember having influenced your songwriting at the time?

T: Gareth had introduced me to Clams Casino, so I was listening to their Instrumentals album along with Friendzone’s Collection I. They both did a lot of pitch shifting and cutting up samples, and as ridiculous as it sounds I tried to incorporate that sort of thing into the demos for NO BLUES. And I think because I did it in such a clumsy, sort of DIY way, it sort of worked integrating it into whatever our sound is. I would sample either my own voice or Kim’s voice. You can hear a loop and cut up samples of that in What Death Leaves Behind and the intro to For Flotsam is my vocal cut up and pitch-shifted, I think. It was a very easy way of incorporating this new texture into our sound, and then those loops would be the starting point for a lot of the songs. For Avocado, Baby that one was heavily inspired by Modest Mouse, but done to a sort of half-disco, half-reggaeton beat. I was unsure and nearly didn’t consider using it, but everyone else in the band really liked it, I think because it was pretty different for us.

G: This is when I particularly got into Nick Cave. So that was a big influence as a lyricist. A Portrait of the Trequartista as a Young Man, is probably the most explicit example. It’s a murder ballad, very Nick Cave in its approach, but maybe too much. The language across the album is very floral. NO BLUES is the most thesaurus-heavy Los Campesinos! album, I would say! I’ve been listening to it in the last couple of weeks, and I’ll sometimes hear a word — I literally could not tell you what that word means anymore. I was trying to be poetic and I think there’s a couple of songs where that’s too apparent. But the album also has maybe my favorite set of lyrics I’ve ever written, which is not a popular Los Campesinos! song or anything –

T: You might need to narrow that down…

G: Let It Spill! The chorus is dumb, but I think the verses and the post-chorus are really good. They’re good lyrics but they’re very Los Campesinos! lyrics as well, and I think it’s important that they’re both good and representative of us as a band.

G: NO BLUES would also probably be the album where, up to that point, I’d been in the best place personally. I’ll exclude Hold On Now, Youngster…, but I would say with We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, Romance Is Boring, and Hello Sadness, I was either depressed or having just broken up a relationship. So NO BLUES was probably the first one where I wasn’t particularly either, and could just write songs without the weight of either of those narratives behind it.

T: This isn’t even a joke, but it’s possible there may have even been a bit of anxiety about the fact that you weren’t in that state of mind. There was a lot of material for Hello, Sadness, so I think for this one, it was like, “Ah, shit, is Gareth happy? Well, how are we going to make a record?”.

T: I was trying to think what we did afterwards [recording in the studio], and the only thing I really remember is the cheerleaders.

G: I wonder what we were trying to reference in doing that? I think for me it was Bloodflow by Smog. So, back in Cardiff a couple of weeks later, we got in touch with the local cheerleading squad, the Cardiff Cougar Allstars. And we’re like, “we want to record you doing the backing vocals for this song.” It was one of the most excruciating and awkward experiences — like, we were just inconveniencing them. They must have been like 10 to 12 years old I guess.

T: Me, Gareth, and Kim gave them the parts to sing [Avocado, Baby] and provided the backing track. I was really nervous because it was just like, a hall full of grumpy young girls just being like, “What do you want? What are you doing?” Everyone had agreed to do it, but no one really knew why they were there. Me and Gareth were just floundering, so I think Kim took over and directed them and we got a few takes. But you could hear how bored they sounded, how annoyed they were to be doing it, and I was just like, “oh my God, this is a disaster.” And they were fully justified in being that way! But I had to pitch-shift their recording up a couple of semitones to make them sound more enthusiastic.

T: I was trying to think what we did afterwards [recording in the studio], and the only thing I really remember is the cheerleaders.

G: I wonder what we were trying to reference in doing that? I think for me it was Bloodflow by Smog. So, back in Cardiff a couple of weeks later, we got in touch with the local cheerleading squad, the Cardiff Cougar Allstars. And we’re like, “we want to record you doing the backing vocals for this song.” It was one of the most excruciating and awkward experiences — like, we were just inconveniencing them. They must have been like 10 to 12 years old I guess.

T: Me, Gareth, and Kim gave them the parts to sing [Avocado, Baby] and provided the backing track. I was really nervous because it was just like, a hall full of grumpy young girls just being like, “What do you want? What are you doing?” Everyone had agreed to do it, but no one really knew why they were there. Me and Gareth were just floundering, so I think Kim took over and directed them and we got a few takes. But you could hear how bored they sounded, how annoyed they were to be doing it, and I was just like, “oh my God, this is a disaster.” And they were fully justified in being that way! But I had to pitch-shift their recording up a couple of semitones to make them sound more enthusiastic.

Did you find it difficult to write songs while you were in a relatively happy place?

G: My approach to writing has always been the same, and unfortunately, seems like it will always be the same, which is much to the distress of Tom. I can only write when I have to write. I do not in any way view myself as a musician or artist until I have to be a musician or artist because there’s an album to record. When you release a song, you kind of renounce ownership of it, because you give it over to those who like the band and the song. At that point if there are elements of the song I no longer stand by, I can live with it. But, to me, it’s really important that the time of writing and then the time of recording are basically the same.

With lyrics, my belief is that if something is honest, it doesn’t have to be good. Great lyrics are preferable, but honest lyrics are good in their very nature – I cannot tolerate lyrics where it’s clear that the writer is putting on an act, or is trying to craft something that isn’t real. NO BLUES feels like an album where I was truly writing for myself. It’s the LC! record that has the most esoteric references, where I really embrace writing about football in a way that I wouldn’t have done previously.

In retrospect, is there anything you’d do differently?

G: No, I don’t think there’s anything I’d change. There’s some lyrics that I’ll look back at and think, “You’ve clearly just had a line to fill there,” but that’ll always always be the case. I think my only regret is I wish we’d left our management before we released it. I wish we were able to do it on our own terms. We own the album now, which is great, but I do think we could have made more of it at the time.

T: I think, weirdly, it’s probably the album we look back on with least regrets in terms of how it turned out. For me personally, I’ve gotten better at sort of seeing everything we do in every record as being a product of where we were in that time and that place. To change it to what I would do now would kind of defeat the point.

Abby Jones is a music and culture journalist from Austin, Texas, living in Brooklyn, New York. She still has the same haircut she had in kindergarten. You can follow Abby on Twitter, and check out more of her work at her website.