Spanish Love Songs - Losers, Pt. 2

Spanish Love Songs are an LA based band described as punk with pop punk and emo vibes about them. They recently released their 3rd album Brave Faces Everyone. They are a band that wear their trauma on their sleeves and vent their various frustrations via their Menzingers-ish, gruff-yet-melodic punk rock and have done so since 2015’s debut LP, Giant Sings The Blues. Things are no better on this record. As this album’s title suggests everything is fucked. These are tales of broken hearts and broken homes, drug abuse and booze, friends dying and loved ones lying, not to mention the drudgery of day-to-day life in a world that will be this bleak forever and there’s nothing anybody can do about it.

Losers, Pt. 2 tells it like it is and rips your heart out accordingly. From the opening vignette of staring at the house you grew up in that you can no longer afford to own post-financial crisis, to the classic Spanish Love Songs bridge in which Dylan solemnly sings, ‘You know, if we weren’t bailed out every time by our parents, we’d be dead,’ the track is a throttling series of truths that cut deep into the millennial psyche. In that respect, the song does what punk rock was always meant to - strike a deep chord with a searingly unpleasant truth.

“This is another case of taking what we do well and trying to focus it outwards,” says Dylan. “I’ve had plenty of people ask why the songs continue to get bleaker and bleaker, but I feel like the answer is pretty obvious. This is the world we know. It’s the world I see my friends stuck in, and that I’ve seen my family stuck in. Everyone works themselves to the bones to just survive. Not to say that we’re not incredibly privileged — I’m aware — but I wanted to look outward and just acknowledge that for the roughly 99 per cent of us, life is an endless grind, so it’s okay to feel down on it. Like, of course you’re anxious when you could fall and hit your head and have you entire life derailed by hospital bills.

“So Losers is the anthem where we try to be defiant and throw up a middle finger — whatever, ‘we’re losers forever.’ But Losers 2 is the hangover. It’s us wrapping our heads around that grind, and feeling like we can’t escape it. And like so much of the album, it’s about trying to empathise with others over this collective gloom.”