Los Bitchos: ‘Every part is crucial. It's like an orchestra’

With a sound based in Latin cumbia, but also drawing on funk, disco and Turkish psychedelic rock, Los Bitchos are simply one of the most fun bands to emerge from the UK underground in recent years. 

Two years on from their debut album Let The Festivities Begin!, the instrumental band returned with the follow-up Talkie Talkie this summer. Building on the groundwork of their debut, the new record feels bigger and bolder, coming across like the soundtrack to an 80s cop movie set in Miami. 

It’s a style so distinct to Los Bitchos that it would be immediately recognisable to anyone who has heard it. However, while the goal was always to create instrumental music, says guitarist and main songwriter Serra Petale, “I don't think we ever were like, ‘Right this is the sound.’” 

“It really just comes from the type of production that I like to listen to,” she goes on. “I like reverby sound, I like a chorus guitar, I like busy-ass basslines and I love percussion. It was never a decision, it was just a happy accident. But of course the sound is always evolving because we're all so different.”

Drummer Nic Crawshaw - herself previously a member of various hardcore punk bands - adds that each member’s different experience means that “you each have your own style” that feeds into an overall sound “without thinking about it.”

As well as different musical backgrounds, their experiences also differ geographically. Nic is British, but Serra is originally from Australia, while synth player Agustina Ruiz hails from Uruguay and bassist Josie Jonsson is Swedish. Each found themselves in London looking for a new project at the same time in 2017. 

The origins of the band lie in demos recorded by Serra, who worked with a number of other musicians to perform them live before settling on this line up. Now every member of the group feels vital to what you hear on a record or see on stage. There’s a fine balance that means no part could be removed without the whole thing coming crashing down. 

“Every part is crucial,” agrees Serra. “It's like an orchestra, almost. An orchestra of all these little parts coming together. I think that's what I love the most about it.”

It took time to find that balance though. Nic admits that grappling with the percussion parts she heard on the demos when she first joined the band was a steep learning curve. 

“It was basically layers and layers of percussion,” she smiles. Although unpicking them was “such a lovely process”. Even still, she adds, “to be honest, the first few shows, I was completely just pretty much improvising my way through the whole song.”

By the time they came to make their first album, they’d got a better handle on how to turn Serra’s demos into a full band experience. Their process, say Serra and Nic, was helped a lot by working with Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos, who produced Let The Festivities Begin! and their self-release debut seven-inch single Pista (Great Start) before that.

“We learned a lot from Alex,” says Nic. “He would get us to really work on a drum and bass groove for a couple of hours. We'd be trying loads of different things out and so we really had something that felt like the best that we could do. And I think we were able to take a lot of that learning into preparing for the second record.”

Having the core songs worked out before heading into the studio allowed them to go deeper into the overall sound with Talkie Talkie producer Oli Barton-Wood, who has also worked with artists including Ezra Collective, Wet Leg, Nilüfer Yanya and The Big Moon. 

“I loved seeing him work his engineering magic in the studio,” says Serra. “I remember that first day when we did our sessions at RAK Studios, he was getting in there with the snare drum. I just love seeing when people are just hella into what the tones of the drums are like. I'm like, this guy's going to be on.”

For many bands, following up a successful debut album is a difficult process - as the saying goes, you have your whole life to write your first album and then six months to write the next. However, for Los Bitchos that wasn’t actually the case. 

Originally scheduled for 2020, the release of their debut ended up being delayed by two years as a result of the pandemic. Turning this to their advantage, they used the downtime to get to work on new songs, some of which can now be heard on Talkie Talkie.

“Delaying the release of our first album was great because we had all this time to then just really work on tunes in between,” says Serra. “Then in 2021 we were lucky enough to start playing some shows again - I think we were like one of the few bands who were able to do that.”

This buffer gave them time to really hone the new songs in rehearsals and test some of them out live.

“Obviously you're then even more confident going into the studio,” says Nic. “Because you've already been drilling the songs and you've got an idea of which bits really go off live and which sections the crowd really reacts to.”

“It's another phase of their evolution, I suppose,” she adds. “Over the next year or two of touring this record I'm sure some of the songs will evolve even more. That's the nice thing, isn't it? That there is that freedom to add in little breakdowns and play around with bits live.”

“It keeps it fresh for us,” says Serra. “It's great to be able to keep playing songs and know that people want to hear them. But I think even for you yourself and for the listener it's nice to see some bits extended, throwing in a few surprises here and there.”

Los Bitchos will play The Lido in Margate on Saturday, November 2. Tickets are £18.50 via Dice. Talkie Talkie is out now on City Slang.