All Hell

How does one best measure the Los Campesinos! experience—in years or albums? Sexual humiliations or World Cup disappointments? Pints of lager or mouthfuls of vomit? Whichever you prefer, they’ve come a long way to reach a recognizable form of “maturity.” All Hell, the Welsh band’s seventh album, ends with a solo acoustic guitar, musings on the afterlife, and hushed backup vocals that make it kinda sound like a late-period Blur song. True to form, it’s also called “Adult Acne Stigmata.”

If the embarrassments of adolescence have become badges of honor in adulthood, well…there’s probably a Los Campesinos! album to which you have an unhealthy attachment, so I won’t dishonor that by calling All Hell their best. But it is unquestionably the ultimate Los Campesinos! album. Self-referential, self-funded, self-managed, self-released, and self-produced, All Hell is a triumphant validation for the coalition Los Campesinos! have amassed in two decades of wandering the margins: emo-curious indie adults, indie-curious emo kids, DIY scenesters and Genius annotators, avid consumers of hard cider and hard-left politics, obsessives of European football and American Football alike.

To call All Hell a form of fan service is hardly a slight, since that’s been the entire point of Los Campesinos! from their very beginning—from their early zines to the “Blood Pact” badge to the “Doomed” football jerseys to their listening party bingo cards or even just the socialist leanings inherent in their name. Throughout their new record, Gareth David pledges allegiance to Hunt sabs and ACABs, secular girls with Catholic guilt, backbreakers of the spineless, cheapskates with costly words. Conversely, the ever-present “them” in positions of authority are anonymous and off-screen, interested solely in protecting their power. “Tell me how many hours in any single dull day/Can I pray to a league table but still it don’t change?” he sneers on “Long Throes,” a perfect expression of the existential dread that comes after years believing that outcomes in politics, sports, or the supernatural could actually be changed by the average person.

Maybe there’s a German word that captures this feeling, but until then, Gareth does his best with a series of truly one-of-one metaphors. As ever, the dizzying array of football, video game, and wrestling references illuminate rather than obscure the syllabus of “adult friendship…drinking for fun and drinking for misery…the heart as an organ and as a burden…climate apocalypse.” The grim jest of life is a “cavalcade through antemortem, terminal suburban boredom,” ground-level organizing is “pooling pennies for the coin-op guillotine”; lust is rendered as familiar greed (“You’re a million bucks and I am avarice”), whereas the climate apocalypse might come before finding true love (“You and me, antipodes/The Earth’s collapse, we finally meet”).

At this point, Los Campesinos! aren’t trying to sway critics who found them too wordy, too effusive, or just plain too much. The band wasn’t writing songs as streamlined and propulsive as “Moonstruck” in their early, bad-diary days, even if the chorus still rests on the word “selenograph.” “Feast of Tongues” builds towards the first true Los Campesinos! lighter-waver, the only lovers left alive survive on “the tongues of the last bootlickers.” But All Hell expands their sound and vision, welcoming diehards who’ll recognize the callbacks to “I Broke Up in Amarante” or any of the “Heart Swells” medleys, casual listeners who crammed “You! Me! Dancing!” into all of their 2007 mix CDs, and the newly converted teens whose parents need explainers of how to act at a Los Campesinos! show.

“Holy Smoke (2005)” finds LC! back in their spite-spitting, scenery-chewing MySpace voice, when Gareth’s top priorities were getting drunk and getting laid. Now with “no children and no profession, walking dead at 37,” Gareth takes a more considered approach, trying to suss out the generation gap between himself and the future of the left (“They don’t buy the beers I drink/And they don’t drink the beers I buy”). “Clown Blood/Orpheus’ Bobbing Head” is a welcome return to the scabrous post/pop-punk of We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed, with its production enlarged for texture—the better to pick up on the nods to Black Desert Online, Leisure Leagues, and Bundesliga.

Every proper song on All Hell honors some past iteration of Los Campesinos! from a more refined perspective, none more so than the one featuring the first Kim Paisey lead vocal in nearly a decade. It’s 18 years of evolution crammed into 156 seconds: the verse is also basically the chorus, Tom Bromley rips off a hotshot solo that would’ve required a session hand on 2008’s Hold On Now, Youngster, the gang vocals sound piped in from a church rather than a pub, and having refrained from barging in over his bandmates for nearly two minutes, Gareth comes in to steal the bridge. But again, if this all sounds like a “mature” version of Los Campesinos!, the song is called “kms” and played for laughs.

“kms” sets the tone for All Hell’s remarkable final stretch, one that amplifies the tender mood that Los Campesinos! have taken since they reclassified themselves “the UK’s first and only emo band” upon seeing their influence spread amongst Tumblr power users and maximalist revival bands. “Grind my bones into the finest snow,” Gareth shouts on “0898 HEARTACHE,” a callback to his early tendencies to envision no better outcome for his life than the most gruesome, awesome death. The message soon changes, as he hopes to be “restored to Earth, afforded a second birth,” providing a feast of rotten fruit for years to come. By the end, Los Campesinos! view mortality with more acceptance than resignation. Maybe this is just the inevitable subtext for a band that once put out a new album every year and now does so once every half decade; especially one surely aware of the precarious longevity of any peoples’ movement.

So yes, Los Campesinos! are thinking about their legacy at a time when formerly beloved athletes, television shows, and politicians have disappeared up their own ass doing the same. The difference here is that, for all of the “self” that went into making All Hell, it’s all in service of endless generosity and respect for the people who made it possible. After 18 years, the members have finally dropped the Campesinos! surnames, the last thing that distinguished them from their own fans. The astonishing amount of care and detail that went into All Hell might just be the result of seven and a half years of creation, or maybe it’s Los Campesinos! giving us an album big enough to live in case it needs to last a lifetime.