It’s when leather-jacketed Serra Petale fans out a hand of flaming playing cards and lights her cigarette off them that you know it’s going to be love. This scene from the video for Las Panteras, part of a linked series of pulpy tales in which the London-based quartet Los Bitchos portray Charlie’s Angels-style secret agents on the trail of a criminal cat gang, encapsulates their charm: silly, self-aware, swaggering with punked-up global psychedelic grooves.
Formed in 2017 over a mutual love of cumbia (Afro-Latin dancing music, laced with rock guitar), Los Bitchos are Australian Petale, ex-drummer of dreamy indie rockers Kid Wave on guitar; Uruguayan former model Agustina Ruiz on keytar; Swede Josefine Jonsson, once of garage rockers Thee MVPs, on bass; and Londoner and NHS physiotherapist Nic Crawshaw on drums.
As the million-plus views on their KEXP live session attest, they’re a band who need to be experienced live, though they’ve bottled their lightning with debut album Let the Festivities Begin!, on which cumbia parties with Turkish and Middle Eastern psych-rock and distorted, fuzzy surf-garage. Recorded pre-pandemic, it was produced by Alex Kapranos of Franz Ferdinand (also the creepy quiz host in the video for Good to Go!), who provided vintage synths and razor-sharp discipline. It’s music made by crate-diggers who aren’t chin-scratchers, whose laudable main ambition, as they told NME, is to “play all over the world and make people dance”.
Let the Festivities Begin! is out now on City Slang. Los Bitchos tour the UK, 15 February-2 March
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