After years away, Madrid's Hinds were finally back in Chicago, closing out the night with an aftershow at the Empty Bottle.
It turned into one of the hottest, sweatiest shows I've ever seen, which is saying something after all the nights I've spent melting there.
The room is small to begin with, and it somehow shrank even further once a post-festival crowd decided they had enough dancing left in their legs to fill a fun-sized version of it. Before long my camera was overheating in my hands, running hotter than I knew was possible, and I started to wonder which of us would make it through the set.
All the while, Carlotta and Ana kept waving everyone closer, wildly optimistic about how much space there was in that little stage of theirs.
The crowd answered with one big wave that surged forward and pressed up against the front row, me included. Somewhere in that squeeze I ended up making unintended friends, mostly because we were all packed in too tightly to do anything else.
My camera had a much tougher time of it than I did, which I only found out once I got home and checked the footage. Every video clip lasted a few erratic seconds before my overheated gear quit to take a breather, its heat mirroring the room's. As if the camera wanted me to put it down and just watch them perform live, which I did, though I still took these shots to remember that summer evening.
2026 Update: This show left me with a small number of photos, plus a video too broken to use. Even the ones I did get were full of grain, since the tricky lighting had me flubbing my exposure settings, reminding me of my newbie status. The touch-up here is subtle, but it's enough to fix some of the brightness and tame the blown highlights.