...So Close To Heaven

LC! storm the charts, introduce our UK tour support and news of an incredible collaboration for the Gearheads

LC! x Buzzing Bugs Guitar Pedal Collab

Here’s a really exciting project Tom and Neil have been working on. The first ever signature Los Campesinos! guitar pedal, imagined by the band and designed and built by Buzzing Bugs Audio Devices.

MORTAL JOY is a meticulously created guitar effects pedal, designed to recreate the primary guitar sounds used on the new album.

It's gain, it's lo-fi, it's saturation, it's tape, it's All Hell!

LC! lead guitarist and producer Tom Bromley says this about the pedal: 

“MORTAL JOY will make things sound worse in the best possible way, and we’re really proud of it. 

Taking inspiration from pedals we use, as well as some of the sounds on All Hell, we designed Mortal Joy with 3 main switches: one that adds dirt, one that can create a lofi tape quality, and one that engages a drastic narrow band-pass filter. Used individually or in combination with each other, these switches can create a wide variety of big, overdriven tones, but also the really tiny, shrunken sounds of a transistor radio or one of those novelty cigarette amps, with potential for massive dynamic shifts with just one switch. 

With the LFOs engaged you can also make things sound beautiful and warbly like an old cassette tape, or push them to make more extreme bendy vibrato sounds, all with an element of randomness as things bounce in and around each other. If you like the sound of old cassettes, DIY bedroom pop, warped vinyl, transistor radios or lofi bands from the 90s, or you’re just embarrassed you spent too much money hiring a fancy studio and need things to sound a little less shiny, then this is the pedal for you”

Pre-orders go live at 7pm BST/2pm EDT on Wednesday August 7th, exclusively on www.buzzingbugsfx.com, limited to 50 units. The pedal will retail at £240. Shipping WORLDWIDE from week commencing 12th August.

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ME REX join the Mortal Joy UK Tour

Flood me with all good shit, because we’re just six weeks out from the MORTAL JOY UK Tour, and we’re really pleased to announce that ME REX will be opening the shows!

ME REX have been one of our favourite UK bands for the last several years, and it’s long overdue that we finally play shows together. Whenever we choose an opener a priority is always that they’ll keep us on our toes. That every night while we watch them play before us we’ll be thinking “they’re amazing, we need to be even better!”. An unhealthy mindset? Absolutely! But having seen ME REX half a dozen times over the past couple of years, I know the LC! shows you see in September will be incredible.

If you don’t already know the band, get familiar with this mammoth playlist below!

Sheffield, Glasgow, Brighton and Birmingham are all SOLD OUT. That leaves just 40 tickets for Manchester (of 1,300 total! What a show that’s gonna be!). Over 1,000 tickets have been sold for Bristol, so if you wanna come, quit waiting and get your ticket (I will mention that the Bristol show a) is on a Friday night, b) finishes at 10pm, and c) the last train back to London is at 10:40pm)

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All Hell Straight in at 14 in the UK Album Chart

Thanks to your support, All Hell hit Number 14 in the UK Albums chart on its week of release. An achievement that far surpassed our headiest hopes. Within a Top 40 that featured 23 albums on Universal, 7 on Sony and 7 on Warner there was All Hell, self-produced, self-managed, self-funded and self-released on our fledgling record label, Heart Swells. Our best selling album, 18 years into our time as a band. Wow! Our success is your success, and we sincerely appreciate all the support you have shown the album so far.

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LC! on 6 Music

Well well well, how the turn tables. Everyone wants a piece of the Los Camp! pie now! Tune into BBC Radio 6 Music from 6pm BST this Wednesday (7th August) to hear Tom and Gareth in conversation with the wonderful Emily Pilbeam sitting in for our Day One, Huw Stephens. We had a lovely chat and they’re gonna be playing 4 tracks from our back catalogue, which is great news for our upcoming PRS payments!

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Jumbo Instore Performance

Leeds record shop Jumbo were amazing hosts to us when we hit the road to play some stripped back acoustic shows a couple of weeks ago. They caught most of the set on camera, so if you’re sad to have missed out on that kind of performance, here’s your chance to catch up on it. I’m not quite narcissistic enough to watch it back, but from a quick skip-through, I think it does a great job of capturing what a warm atmosphere it was, with a lot of laughs and camaraderie. Cheers Jumbo!

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Last of the All Hell Shirts

Now’s your last chance to pick up the three shirt designs that were available as part of the All Hell pre-order. One for kms, one for the Coin-Op Guillotine, and one for Clown Blood. These designs won’t be reprinted, it’ll be all new merch for upcoming shows.

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• A few of you were really keen on this awesome poster collaboration with the inimitable Black Lodge Press, made exclusively for our appearance at the recent 2000 Trees Festival. There were about 20 left over from the festival and you can get one here if you’re fast. Our share of profits on this design has been donated to PAFRAS, supporting refugees and asylum seekers in Leeds.

  

• “A small catalog of reflections on aging made possible by Los Campesinos!”. There has been so much fantastic writing about All Hell over the past few weeks. Best of the bunch though might be this Annie Howard piece, published over at Defector.

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The UK is currently, more so than ever, besieged by racism and Islamophobia, enacted by the Far Right. Emboldened by our political class and a complicit mainstream media that has demonised Muslims and migrants for decades.

We know that the vast majority of our audience, the vast majority of you reading this, are White. It is our responsibility that whenever we see racism we give it no quarter. It is our duty to stand up for our Black and Brown friends and neighbours.

Not all of us will feel able to put ourselves physically in the way of the rioting and violence that we are witness to. But we are all, at the very least, capable of standing up to relatives, work colleagues and acquaintances when they express racist and discriminatory views. Let them know who you stand alongside, and that it certainly isn’t them.

Solidarity always,

LC! x