Madrid-based rock band Hinds got together over FaceTime for the latest installment of “In My Room,” Rolling Stone‘s new IGTV series in which musicians perform from their homes as a way of reaching out to the world during the coronavirus pandemic.
Lead vocalist Carlotta Cosials introduces the group, saying that she and her three bandmates are all broadcasting separately from their homes, as Madrid and the whole of Spain continue to live under quarantine.
“We’ve been quarantined for, like, 14 days?” she says, struggling to remember. “I’m not very sure — I think it’s 15 days? I don’t know, I lost the count, to be honest.”
In an interview with Rolling Stone, Cosials further describes life in Madrid during the pandemic as “pretty scary.”
“I live downtown, so it would be like living next to Times Square,” she says, “and I have windows where I can see the street, and there’s no one. There’s been no one in two weeks.” Cosials compares the experience to living in a village — the local birds have taken over the city streets, and though Cosials hasn’t seen her friends in person for weeks, she can still have conversations with her next-door neighbor from 20 meters away.
For “In My Room,” Hinds performed two of their songs — “New for You,” from their 2018 album, I Don’t Run, and their latest single, “Come Back and Love Me” — by cobbling together separate video feeds of each of the band members performing, and then syncing them all together. In “New for You,” Cosials appears in two simultaneous screens, for guitar and vocals, respectively. She did the same for “Come Back and Love Me,” in which her bandmate Ana Perrote also appears twice, performing on keyboard in one screen and guitar and lead vocals in the other.
Unsurprisingly, Cosials says the recording process over FaceTime was very challenging.
“We are performing the songs by listening to [the recording] from the album, but we are doing it separately,” she says (In the video, you can see some of the band listening to the prerecorded tracks through one earbud.)
Each member recorded their parts separately, then sent the best take to Cosials, who compiled them together. The band initially tried to perform another song for the series, but there were “too many silences” on the track that caused Cosials and Perrote to be out of sync with each other.
“As we are separated in different houses, even just a tiny bit of slowing down from the drums, or speeding up a little bit from the guitar, it feels like it’s not synchronized,” Cosials adds. She also says that they wouldn’t have been able to play together live over video chat, as even the best livestreams are bound to have some lag or delay.
Hinds will release their new album, The Prettiest Curse, on June 5th. (It was originally set for an April release. “The coronavirus is something that is affecting a lot of our loved ones, so for right now we think all of our focus should be on staying safe and staying home, not promoting a new album,” the band said in a statement announcing the delay.)
Cosials tells Rolling Stone that the recording process for The Prettiest Curse was more leisurely than they’re used to: “For the first time, we had time to sit down and not rush … and think not only ‘What do we want to tell to the world,’ but how we want to tell it.”
