Hinds recommend three great artists you’ve never heard
Music. We love and hate it. It’s an endless pit of creativity, innovation, stolen ideas, boring ideas, genius, stupidity, and so on. The amount of music out there and the ease of access we have to music from different decades and around the world mean that it’s difficult to stay on top of the music continuously being released. The Beatles, Led Zeppelin, and Joni Mitchell are all go-to legends, but there is so much more out there.
The question is, how do you find all of the underground music that you’re keen on listening to? You can use streaming services to dig around, but eventually, you start to form a taste, and the algorithm caters towards it. Finding new music from unknown artists can be very hard, regardless of how hard you try.
Luckily, there are some people out there whose job is to constantly immerse themselves in music, namely, musicians. Not only do they write and tour persistently, but they are also continually on the lookout for new styles of music that they can enjoy, draw from, and be influenced by.
This isn’t a new practice. Some of the best bands in the world have taken from artists that they may not have encountered in their everyday lives. For instance, Led Zeppelin enjoyed travelling, and when they visited other countries, they enjoyed bringing back rhythm and melody from all over the world and injecting it into their music.
This is what happened with the song ‘Dancing Days’, as Robert Plant and Jimmy Page went on a visit to Bombay and came across an Indian song that they fell in love with. When they got home, they decided to write about it, and the result was one of Led Zeppelin’s most spontaneous and upbeat tracks.
Of course, the members of Led Zeppelin aren’t ones for listening to much new music these days. Luckily, plenty of other bands can provide recommendations for you to listen to. Hinds are one of them. With their invigorating and infectious sound that spans multiple genres, the band has several different artists who influence them. Upon establishing that sound, they have come across a range of different artists who you might not have heard before but who are well worth a listen.
The first is the band Goodbye Honolulu, specifically their song ‘Bum Me Out’. “We know these guys. They’re super young guys from Toronto, and they supported us for a few shows. One day we were backstage listening to what was going on onstage and, fuck, it’s very, very good!” said Carlotta Cosials, “We went down and freaked out over how the live show went. The energy they had—they were awesome.”
Ade Martin recommended Pretty Girls and their track ‘A Song for Trina’. “It reminded me so much of early Hinds,” she said, “Not the melody or anything, but the feeling of it. It was clearly just this guy and his friend, recording this in a messy way. It reminded me so much of us that I felt like I had the obligation to give back.”
Finally, Amber Grimbergen said people should listen to ‘Violet and Mildred’ by Albert Bagman. “He’s so, so shy—the shyest person ever—and I think it’s amazing that he’s doing his own thing,” she said, “He performs with his back to the audience—it’s crazy. When we did the tour [with him], he sent us a link to his music; I listened to it for months.”
