Every Los Campesinos! Album Ranked

Los Campesinos! have never made a bad album. From the ‘00s twee stylings (that they rejected just as quickly as it helped put the UK group on the map), to their quirky spin on fourth-wave emo that was both darker and dancier than most of their American counterparts in the same movement, to their graduation to the level of elder statesmen of anthemic, personal-political pop punk, Los Campesinos are a band who’ve maintained a distinctive musical identity throughout each stage of their creative evolution. They’ve consistently been on the fringes of various musical and subcultural trends, influencing peers and successors across subgenres while never fully ingratiating themselves into any particular scene. Instead, their priority has always been embracing their own idiosyncrasies and making the records that they want to hear, and it’s served them well so far. This is a band that has remained steadfast in their commitment to playing to their strengths—strengths that become more and more apparent with each Los Campesinos! release.

Of course, not all Los Campesinos! albums are created equal, though more importantly, every Los Campesinos! album sounds like a Los Campesinos! album. Almost two decades into their career and having gone through several lineup changes, they’re just two days away from releasing their seventh album and their first in seven years. In honor and anticipation of the forthcoming All Hell, here’s one fan’s extremely subjective ranking of every Los Campesinos! record from “worst” to best.

7. Hold On Now, Youngster (2008)

One album had to be ranked last, okay? Los Campesinos! feel like one of those cases where the song or album that’s most associated with a band’s whole oeuvre is—at least to those “in the know”—not necessarily representative of their output as a whole. Their debut put the big twee target on LC!’s backs, and it wasn’t even six months before they started trying to shake it off. Of all LC! albums, Hold On Now, Youngster feels the most dated—the tinkering instrumental arrangements, the sentence-long song titles, the references to fairy lights and dirty little mash notes scrawled on personalized stationery—but there’s an argument to be made for the importance of a record that’s inextricable from the aesthetics of its time, particularly it’s art that’s executing such aesthetic choices in a way far more artful than most of the artist’s peers. If Los Campesinos! had to be reluctant twee poster children, they played their role pretty damn well.

6. Sick Scenes (2017)

There was one unbearably hot summer (I say this as if it doesn’t describe all of them) where I worked a fancy internship that I knew would look good on my resume but regularly reminded me just how much I had no fucking clue what I was doing—at this job and in general. Every day I donned my best business casual and sweated through it on the subway. If I could make it until the ride home from work till my first Sick Scenes listen, I considered it a good day. If I didn’t have to pause it to hop off the train and retch into a subway platform trash can from a combination of motion sickness, all-consuming anxiety, and a diet of binging or starving (depending on the day), even better. This record is more slow-moving and reserved than previous ones, which made it one that I struggled to connect with when it first came out. But on the days that made my head spin and my flesh nearly melt off my bones, I needed it badly.

Essential Tracks
“Renato Dall’Ara (2008)”: A song that kicks off the record by picking up not necessarily where the band left off, but where they began; the abstract of a decade-old band in three minutes.
“I Broke Up in Amarante”: This song has one of the catchiest choruses in LC!’s discography (no small feat)—and one that reflects their characteristic juxtaposition of purple-to-plainspoken prose seamlessly.
“5 Flucloxacillin”: The more I listen to this ode to medication and late-stage installment in the Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown series, the more it feels like the band dipping a toe back into their abandoned twee tendencies, especially at the twinkly chorus, and it’s an instance in which a backpedal is actually a step in the right direction.

5. NO BLUES (2013)

Gareth has said that Los Campesinos! shows sometimes feel like sporting events. They’re an easy band to root for, and one that knows how to incite the kind of rowdy, red-cheeked, arms-tossed-over shoulders camaraderie that you’d find at a sports bar on game day. Recognizing the opening notes of a deep cut during their concerts feels like watching them score a goal. NO BLUES isn’t a concept album about UK football, it’s one that amps up the already-frequent football references, and it isn’t even really “about” them. Rather, the game is a conduit for emotional action and reaction. Every moment thrums with make-or-break potential energy, showcasing a band at their most precarious and most hopeful. Each win and—a more common songwriting subject—each loss, is a collective public spectacle, their sound expanding to stadium size.

Essential Tracks
“For Flotsam”: This one has all the classic LC! Hallmarks—lost love, soccer references, anti-Tory sentiment, puking, and a catchy hook that you’ll try in vain to sing along to simultaneously with the backing chorus.
“Avocado, Baby”: This was the second LC! Song I ever heard and the first one that I thought was impossibly cool—that thick bassline at the beginning, Gareth’s pained howling over cowbell hits, the stacked children’s choir-sounding vocals that, for some reason, were having a huge moment in the early 2010s and are executed here in a way that’s surprisingly tasteful and un-saccharine.
“Cemetery Gaits”: A song about screwing in a cemetery that also invokes/makes fun of Morrissey. Need I say any more?

4. We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed (2008)

Usually such a quick turnaround between albums would be suspicious, but Los Campesinos!’s speedy follow-up was not sweepings from their debut album’s cutting room floor, but a completely new, filled-out chapter of their ever-expanding musical universe. WAB,WAD feels like a more accurate introduction to LC! than HON,Y did. Not only did their sound get darker and fuzzier as LC! began to establish their reputation as “the UK’s only emo band,” but this is the record where Gareth’s persona and storytelling chops begin to really take shape, as he (or a dramatized version of him) steps into the light as the unlucky protagonist of his songs: a snotty reluctant romantic, prone to self-deprecation, oscillating wildly between esoteric rambling and profane bluntness. WAB,WAD is textured and rough, a portrait of a band learning to stand on its wobbly legs, coming into its own.

Essential Tracks
“We Are Beautiful, We Are Doomed”: The horny, self-loathing jealousy ballad is a staple of LC!’s discography, and this title track feels like the first in a long line of classics of its ilk.
“Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown #1”: All the Documented Minor Emotional Breakdowns are essential listening for any new fan looking to get into LC! (might I recommend this playlist of all of them in order?). “I restored your mother’s faith in men whilst boring you to death” is a killer opening line to one song, let alone a decade-spanning series of five (and counting).
“Heart Swells / Pacific Daylight Time”: Listening to this song feels like reading a stranger’s love letter that you found crumpled up in the trash.

3. All Hell (2024)

In some ways, legacy bands get a raw deal. If a well-established and well-loved indie stalwart fails to live up to the self-set standard of their earlier releases, they’ve fallen off, but if they continue with their consistently artful output, they’re only doing what’s expected of them. If they stay in a familiar lane, fans and critics will bitch and moan about how it sounds just like their old shit, but if they switch up they’re sound, they’re trying to fix something that wasn’t broken in the first place, and fans and critics will bitch and moan about how their old shit was better. All Hell feels aware of this, though not to the group’s detriment. It feels like a band balancing their tried and true abilities with their knowledge that they haven’t run out of new ideas just yet. Threads from previous records are picked up where they’ve been dropped—a new State Song, a new installment in the “Documented Minor Emotional Breakdown” canon. Gareth sings about the same shit he’s always been singing about—self-loathing, sexual frustration, waiting for capitalism to hurry up and dig its own grave—and he sings about how he’s been singing about the same stuff for his whole career. It probably shouldn’t work, but somehow it does.

Essential Tracks
“Holy Smoke (2005)”: A line as diabolical as “Nowadays it’s Live, Laugh, Love and listen to Death From Above” leaves any alleged indie sleaze revival dead in a ditch, but as Gareth later muses on being “walking dead at 37,” he realizes that he might not be quite so above it all. It’s refreshing to see him contend with being a legacy act while not taking himself or his subcultural baggage too seriously.
“Feast of Tongues”: It’s not just the acutely specific way Gareth delivers an (unfortunately) widely applicable sociopolitical message, or the build from the vast and spacious intro into an explosive anthem, or even the if-you-know-you-know lyrical references to Silver Jews and The Hotelier that make All Hell’s lead single the perfect comeback track to both remind longtime fans why they’ve stuck with this band and introduce a new generation of fans to the group’s oeuvre. It’s all of these reasons and more than make “Feast Of Tongues” an apocalyptic love song for the ages.
“Clown Blood / Orpheus’ Bobbing Head”: A track that mentions clowns, puppets, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and deep dish pizza—all while sounding like My Chemical Romance circa Three Cheers? Sure, why the hell not.

2. Romance is Boring (2010)

My fingertips still hold the sense-memory of hitting “reblog” on an overexposed photo of a pair of pale, bleeding calves as it flashed across my Tumblr dashboard. Bodily fluids run through Los Campesinos!’s discography with grossly intimate abandon; their third record barrels ahead spilling blood, sweat, and puke into pouty punk songs, paring back their grand instrumentation into rough, skeletal arrangements, and dabbling in occasional electronic flourishes on tracks like “In Medias Res” and “I Warned You: Do Not Make An Enemy Of Me.” On an emotional level, Romance is Boring is gloriously melodramatic and indulgent, each heartbreak sliced open and laid guts-out, its grand-scheme insignificance an even greater tragedy than the initial blow. Not having a great love is unfortunate but ultimately sufferable. Not having a great love story? Fucking apocalyptic. The world keeps turning even when your heart gets crushed—and how dare it carry on so indifferently! This outsized misery turned back inward is what makes Romance is Boring so brilliant. It’s a record that’s as obsessed with the narrative as it is doomed by it.

Essential Tracks
“In Medias Res”: Naming your album opener after the method with which you begin the album, and having the very first line be “…But let’s talk about you for a minute” is a genius move, as is everything in the four and a half minutes that follow.
“Romance is Boring”: The word “darling” has never dripped with as much contempt as it does on this sharp, pissy anti-love song. It’s physically impossible for me to listen to this song without pounding my fists on any available surface as hard as I can.
“This is a Flag. There is No Wind”: You had me at “CAN WE ALL PLEASE JUST CALM THE FUCK DOWN?” after almost an entire album of doing the exact opposite, and then continue to ignore this gang-shouted advice for the rest of it. Truly a band after my own heart.

1. Hello Sadness (2011)

I’ve been listening to Los Campesinos! for a decade and for most of that, Hello Sadness was not my favorite album of theirs—it probably didn’t even crack the top 3. But for some reason during the dead of 2021-2022 winter, this record burrowed into me and refused to leave. At the time, I was a year and a half out of college, living in my childhood home, mostly-unemployed, taking part-time gigs as a nanny and tutor. After I’d put the kids to bed, I would wander around their apartment staring out windows, opening and closing kitchen drawers, absentmindedly scanning their parents’ bookshelves—Hello Sadness in my headphones, clouded visions of “real adulthood” passing through my mind. I’d listen to it again on my walk home, moving fast enough to keep my toes from going numb in the freezing weather, but taking a longer route so I could listen to the album in full. Hello Sadness feels darker than other LC! albums, colder and windier too. It’s an album that tunnels into itself as it goes on. When I listen to Hello Sadness, I think of those walks. I map out my path by which song I’d get to on which street, mentally adding to each one the sound of wind gusts whipping against one another at crosswalks as I waited for the light to change. I wouldn’t exactly say that it kept me company during that lonely, amorphous winter, but it was there.

Essential Tracks
“Hello Sadness”: Grotesquely sexy. Went 3x Platinum on my Tumblr in 2014.
“Songs About Your Girlfriend”: Grotesquely sexy in a different way. Went triple platinum on my Challengers-themed playlist in 2024.
“Baby I Got the Death Rattle”: I don’t know if this is the best Los Campesinos! song but most days it’s my favorite, and it’s perhaps the one that feels most representative of everything they do best. Gareth doesn’t waste a single word, he chews each one down to the bone. Each little detail—the muffled echo thrown over certain vocals, the sorrowful strings underlining each verse, the subtle rattle noise at the first chorus, the plea to be remembered after death as a fantastic lay—is perfectly placed. When the key change leads into the miserably badass bridge and the outro that follows, the payoff that not just the song, but the entire album has been building to, is unmatched.