Interview – Los Blancos – Breaking Glass Magazine

Steadily creeping out from under the musical radar, Los Blancos released their debut album last month; an impressive collection of songs spanning different genres and past references. Definitely ones to watch, get to know the band a little better here…

For anyone who hasn’t had the pleasure of hearing you yet, tell us a little about Los Blancos…

We’re a 4 piece band from West Wales, we play slacker rock with influences from punk, country and shoegaze

Your album Sbwriel Gwyn was released last month – what’s the story behind it and who deserves a shout out for helping you complete it?

Sbwriel Gwyn is Welsh for ‘white trash’, which is what we often refer to each other as affectionately. It encompasses all sorts of our experiences in recent years from heartache, rural isolation, friendship, alcohol and a love song to a dog. Couldn’t have done it without Gruff from Libertino and Krissy Jenkins, our producer.

There’s a bit of a resurgence in contemporary artists singing in regional languages and accents, how important is it to you to write and sing in Welsh?

It is important but it was also never a conscious decision, it’s not like we were looking to make a political statement. Welsh is what we speak to each other so when we started jamming and writing together the lyrics were just naturally written in Welsh, it would be insincere to try and translate them and they’d lose meaning.

(From the band’s Facebook page)

It feels like there’s a huge range of musical influences on the album, who did you all listen to growing up and what’s the last album you each bought?

We all have different tastes but have common ground in Pavement, Brian Jonestown, Ty Segall… these are artists we were listening a lot to when we started Los Blancos

Last albums:
Dewi – Bodega, Shiny New Model
Osian – Cage the Elephant, Happy Birthday
Gwyn – John Prine, Prime Prine
Emyr – Allah-las, LAHS

What’s your local music scene like – any other artists you’d recommend we should look out for?

Papur Wal, Sybs and Hyll are shit hot

If you could put a copy of Sbwriel Gwyn into any one person’s hands and guarantee they would listen to it, who would you choose?

Idris Elba

And where can we see you live, what are your touring plans for the coming months?

We’ll be playing a tour around Wales, in Cardiff, Cardigan, Wrexham and Caernarfon. We’ve also got a few more gigs in and around Wales as well.

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Sbwriel Gwyn is available now on Libertino Records – there’s a link to the video for the title track in our previous new music feature and you can watch the video for opening single Dilyn Iesu Grist below