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
