☎️ 0898 HEARTACHE - Listen Now

The latest song to be taken from All Hell is all yours. PLUS, US/Toronto shows start this weekend, all the details plus new merch, and competitions.

Now we’re really cooking. To follow Feast of Tongues and A Psychic Wound, here’s 0898 HEARTACHE, the third single from our forthcoming album, All Hell. Listen to the song on YouTube right now, it hits streaming platforms at midnight EST.

Grace Robins-Somerville writes on 0898 HEARTACHE: “Call me if you want a bad time” could very well be Los Campesinos!’s motto. Sad-sack self pitying is a staple of Gareth’s songwriting, though never in a way that feels solipsistic. This is a band that understands just how deeply misery loves company. Instead of burrowing inward, Campesinos!-brand melancholia is communal, even celebratory. Cynical quips are cordial invitations to a party where the theme is feeling like shit. 

Doomed romance is hardly unfamiliar territory for LC!, but on 0898 HEARTACHE, the third single from their seventh record, All Hell, the love-and-death dichotomy speaks to the personification of the nebulousness of a musician’s relationship to their career as much as it does to a lover. Jittery guitars and cymbals fade in on an established artist contending with the arc of their life and their career. Time lapses slowly and invisibly until the past catches up with the present all at once, making itself unignorable. “There’s no Runners Up Hall Of Fame,” Gareth remarks in a characteristically tongue-in-cheek one liner shrouding embarrassingly true desire. 0898 HEARTACHE makes the humiliation of caring about your own legacy feel like drunk dialling an ex, stupidly high risk with a tiny sliver of potential for reward: “If your calling me’s a mistake, then tell me why we’re both still on the line?”. It’s a worn-down renewal of vows, a conscious sacrifice of dignity in exchange for momentary understanding, a reluctant pledge of loyalty to longshot odds — ’til death do us part"

Tom says: “The music was written late 2020, while probably feeling sorry for myself about a Christmas alone. I think the initial ideas for this were the result of the heightened emotional state we’d all been in after that year. I know Gareth always likes a little extra space in a song to allow him to develop his ideas in more detail, so this was an attempt at a longer, more patient track, a build and burst scaffold for him to scream from the top of”

Gareth says: “0898 is a lovelorn, head-down sprint from limbo into oblivion. A song about negotiating with Mother Nature, drinking yourself blind-drunk, and breaking loaded silences with pointed questions on a long-distance call to everyone you ever knew”

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🇺🇸🇨🇦 Tour Starts This Weekend

We’ve been looking forward to this trip for so long, and would you believe it, all of a sudden it’s here. We had our final pre-flight band practice last night, and have rehearsed over 35 songs to call upon throughout the tour. Gear is packed, laundry is being done and I can practically taste that delicious Heathrow pint.

Below is all the info you’ll need for the East Coast/Midwest run of shows (West Coast to follow soon, but please keep an eye on our socials for those). Tickets remain for Boston, Philly, Cleveland and Los Angeles. If you’re planning on coming, please pick up your tickets in advance, it makes a real difference!

If you’ve got any queries on what to expect, that might be covered in this old newsletter we sent about touring, but stick any Qs in the comments. One small request: please don’t queue outside the gig hours before doors. You’ll get a great spot without needing to do that. And as an extension of that theme…if you’re on the barrier from the start then you’d better be familiar with Short Fictions and Fresh, who are opening for us on the East and West respectively. If you’re not familiar with them, then please let their fans up front while they play!

As always, we’ll have a merch desk crammed full of sick designs.

This tour’s range features our first ever Tour Dates shirt! We’ll also have NO BLUES, Sick Scenes (new US exclusive pink and white cornetto vinyl version) and Sparky Deathcap’s Tear Jerky EP available to buy on vinyl.

And we’ll have a limited edition tour poster! This is an all-time favourite for us. Originally made for a 2010 show at the Granada Theater in Dallas, Texas with all the moon imagery around the new album we got in touch with the designers, Magnificent Beard, to see if they’d be up for a 2024 Remix. Gold and purple ink on ‘grapesicle’ colour card, get to the merch desk quick for this one.

ps. If you’re at one of these shows you’ve gotta be quick in learning 0898 by heart…

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All Hell in DIY Mag

A couple of weeks ago I had my first proper chat about All Hell with our old friends at DIY mag. It feels surreal to be chatting about the album as something that exists outside the 7 of us, but it also feels really fucking good. There’s a 3 page spread in the new DIY mag, which you can order a physical copy of, or read the digital edition now! Featuring: album spoilers, how we’’ll never be a nostalgia act, and LC!’s three-point-plan for a socialist utopia.

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UK Shows Near Sell Out

We’re constantly humbled by the enthusiasm and kindness that all LC! news receives, but ticket sales for the MORTAL JOY UK TOUR have blown our minds. These are our biggest ever non-London UK gigs and they’re already selling out. Brighton sold out on Day 1, and Glasgow wasn’t far behind. We’ve upgraded our Glasgow show to QMU, so an extra 300 LC! fans are able to attend.

No other shows will be upgraded. I’m unsure if we’ve spoken about this publicly before, but we have a (UK so far but we are going to extend to the US) policy of only playing independent venues. We won’t play O2 sponsored or other corporate venues, and no other shows on this run can be upgraded without breaking that rule.

The total capacity of the tour is 5,645 tickets. Of which 4,631 have already been sold. 82%! All the shows are on the weekend AND we’ve already confirmed the show end times, so if we’re not playing in a city near you, why not use us as an excuse to visit a new city? We’ll see you there.

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All Hell Test Pressing Raffle for Tiny Changes

Tiny Changes is Scotland’s first national young people’s mental health charity, set up in memory of artist and Frightened Rabbit frontman Scott Hutchison. We only met Scott briefly, sharing a festival stage with his band on a couple of occasions. But we share mutual friends, and a lot of mutual fans, who can attest to how Scott’s music and art made tiny changes that had a big impact on peoples’ lives.

I’ve donated my personal copy of the All Hell test-pressing, to raise money for the charity. We’ve never given away a TP before, and only 5 of these exist, so it’s a rare opportunity to own a very rare item. I’ve even scrawled the song titles onto the sleeve for added authenticity!

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• Matt and I went to see our friend claire rousay play in Bristol last week. I’ve gone on about how amazing claire is tons of times in the past so her set was obviously as good as expected. But I also had that all-too-rare experience of becoming obsessed with an opener I’d not heard before. Lots of Hands opened with a solo set, and I was completely captivated. I listened to their album fantasy as soon as I got back to the hotel, and I cannot remember the last time I looped an album so much. Hard recommend from LC!.

• 2000 Trees have given us 2 free tickets to give away to LC! fans. This is our only festival appearance of the year, and the first time we’ll be playing songs from All Hell in the UK. Enter the competition at this link, and check the full lineup below. Competition ends on the 16th June, but if you’re not lucky, there are still day-tickets left for the Thursday (or full weekend tickets) and they’re just £35!

  

• I also had a really fun chat with Vancouver journalist writer Ethan Sawyer for his Human Pursuits substack. Ethan was great to talk to, so it’s a super-laidback conversation, a bit about writing, a bit about singing, a bit about Steve McLaren and then finally a brief musing on DEATH to send everyone home happy.

• Oink Oink, we’re the talk of the latest Gig Pigs podcast! LC!’s number one celebrity fan Ivo Graham chats about us and our Troxy show with less famous but no-less-funny comedian pals Alex Kealy and Christopher MacArthur-Boyd. This pod reminded me of a classic ruse we used to pull on naive young journalists, removing the labels from any beer we were drinking and stating we had to due to an exclusivity clause with Budweiser. Sorry Christopher!

Okay, that’s it for now! We’re so excited to meet or catch up with a lot of you in the States. If you’ve got any recommendations for cool stuff (vegan food, great bars, coffee, book/record shops) in the vicinity of the venues, let us know in the comments! We’re so buzzing about everything we’ve got going on. Now is an amazing time to be in Los Campesinos!, and we hope it’s a good time to be a Los Camp! fan too.

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See you in the comments. LC! x