On Monday night, the band was in Manhattan for a session with Tumblr, Cosials said. Abruptly, with a 4 a.m. flight scheduled so the band could make it to Albuquerque, New Mexico, for a Tuesday night show, the session transformed.
“I don’t know exactly how, but it changed, and it was suddenly a show, and you could invite people and a lot of people came, and it was people in the middle of the night in the middle of Manhattan,” she said. “Everybody had fun. There was beer.”
Hinds’ country-crossing will extend to Bloomington when it plays at 8 p.m. Sunday at the Bishop. As of now, the Bloomington date is the band’s only headlining show on its current stretch of North American dates, which includes stints with Glass Animals and Public Access TV as well as a one-off show with the Black Lips and Ariel Pink.
Cosials formed Hinds as a two-piece called Deers with co-guitarist/vocalist Ana García Perrote in 2011. A two-track single called “Demo” was their first release in 2014. Within the next year, they’d earned praise from publications like NME and the Guardian, released a second single, “Barn,” and changed their name after a similarly named band threatened legal action.
And while it’s still possible to find only six of the band’s songs online, it’s amassed a substantial following — its Facebook page, for example, has nearly 27,000 likes.
Cosials said it’s impossible for her to pick a single most important or exciting event during the band’s sudden rise.
“It’s been like a chain of, let’s say, good things,” she said. “So you really can’t take one. All of them were important for the next one. You need all of the things on the chain to make it work.”
Hinds added a link to that chain when it entered the studio last December to record its debut album, “Leave Me Alone.” Part of the record includes previously released songs, but much of it was written quickly in the days leading up to tracking, including one song written completely in-studio.
Cosials said the songwriting process for those newer songs differed drastically from the writing of older songs, which she said took as long as two months for any given song. They’re perfectionists, she said, which made writing and recording “Leave Me Alone” in a short time frame even more stressful.
Now she’s just looking forward to the release of “Leave Me Alone.” When the album comes out Jan. 8, she said it’ll be a relief to have the songs out in the world and to watch as crowds learn them, especially after the frantic writing sessions.
“We’d been touring a lot, and we’d been doing a lot of work and a lot of interviews and a lot of stuff all the time, so it was so hard to find the time to pick up, to write songs,” she said. “We spent so many nights not sleeping and so many days we should be eating with our families just writing songs. (But) it’s worth it.”
