Spanish girl group Hinds (formerly Deers) stole the hearts of a million indie kids when they emerged in a haze of scruffy guitar-pop sass, red lippy and reverb-heavy, surf harmonies last year; now their close mates The Parrots have boarded an EasyJet flight from Madrid and joined the party.

Sharing that same infectious, lo-fi, raucous spirit, the two bands kicked up a storm at SXSW and released a split 7” together for Record Store Day, before lads Diego Garcia (vocals, guitar), Dani Lorenzo (drums) and Alex de Lucas (bass) took their rattling, sweaty, garage rock chaos on a road trip along the West Coast and all the way to Mexico.

Set for a breakthrough summer of hard gigging festival madness, the trio’s ‘boys-in-a-band’, good-time revelry is brash and boisterous enough to turn a gathering of nuns into a keg-chugging, Animal House orgy. Their cover of ‘All My Loving’, by Black Lips side project The Almighty Defenders, sets things off nicely by turning a throat-straining singalong into a gospel-goes-punk crash about. Other tracks to emerge – ‘Dee Dee Dangerous’ and ‘Loving You Is Hard’  – sound like scrappy jukebox singles from a warped, underground 60s beat group.

It’s an age old garage-rock template that they loyally follow from The Kingsmen to The Sonics, to Billy Childish and zillions of others, but when it’s done with this much boozy, ear-grinning exuberance its neigh on impossible not to throw off the shackles, shake your moptop and pogo about like a demented jack in the box.

Fans of King Khan, The Hives, Palma Violets and maybe even The Libertines should definitely take a listen,and look out for an EP coming in June on Luv Luv Luv Records.

 

Kevin Irwin
@TrotterFist