Every Los Campesinos! Album Ranked
The Cardiff band's seven albums, in order from good to great.
Photo by Martyna Bannister
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.
Essential Tracks
“You! Me! Dancing”: This was the first LC! song I ever heard—it’s most people’s first LC! Song. It’s the obvious pick, but for good reason. May it encourage socially awkward teenagers to bust a move for years to come.
“My Year in Lists”: It’s up there with Death Cab For Cutie, the Mountain Goats and the Dismemberment Plan in the indie rock New Year’s canon, and few parentheses in history have been quite as load-bearing as the ones sandwiching the word “before” in this diabolical chorus.
“Sweet Dreams, Sweet Cheeks”: The instruments dropping out one by one until it’s just violin and gang vocals at the outro retroactively feels like a sneak peek of the group’s seamless pivot to pop punk.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.-
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