Spanish Love Songs are looking firmly ahead on their fifth album ‘FUTURE NAUSEA’, although they are not particularly thrilled by what they see. The Los Angeles band will release the record on November 6 via Pure Noise Records, with new single ‘Good American’ providing its first introduction.
Produced by former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla and Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, ‘FUTURE NAUSEA’ takes some of its musical cues from the widescreen sound of heartland rock. But where that genre often trades in nostalgia, Spanish Love Songs are more interested in the anxieties waiting around the next corner.
Lead single ‘Good American’ makes that clear. At its centre is anger at institutions that offer belonging and opportunity before abandoning the people they recruited when they are no longer useful.
Musically, the band keeps ‘Good American’ deliberately direct. It is loud, relatively stripped back and built to work in the sort of packed rooms where Spanish Love Songs have spent the past decade developing their audience.
‘FUTURE NAUSEA’ follows 2020’s ‘Brave Faces Everyone’, 2023’s ‘No Joy’ and last year’s collaborative EP ‘A Brief Intermission in the flattening of time’. This time the band wanted to make a bigger rock record, drawing inspiration from the scale of albums such as Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’, The Killers’ ‘Sam’s Town’ and Tom Petty’s ‘Full Moon Fever’.
Across the album, ringing guitars, keyboards and large choruses rub against considerably darker subject matter. ‘Living Blues’ pushes forward with a steady pulse, while ‘New Fears’ draws on the swagger of classic heartland rock. ‘Welcome to Hell’ opens the sound out further, before ‘Jan666’ and ‘No Dreams’ examine the experience of watching someone disappear into right-wing extremism and become almost unrecognisable.
That sense of community has always mattered to Spanish Love Songs. Over the past decade they have built their audience through club shows and tours alongside The Wonder Years, Rise Against, Alkaline Trio, The Menzingers and Hot Mulligan, as well as festival appearances at Furnace Fest, 2000trees and the revived Vans Warped Tour.
