Spanish Love Songs will release Future Nausea on 6 November, with Good American introducing an album that turns the band’s political frustration into widescreen rock.
by Paul Cashmere
Los Angeles punk and alternative rock band Spanish Love Songs will release their fifth full-length album, Future Nausea, on 6 November through Pure Noise Records, with Good American released as the first single. Produced by former Death Cab for Cutie guitarist Chris Walla and Illuminati Hotties’ Sarah Tudzin, the 12-track album extends the band’s emotionally direct songwriting into a larger rock framework while confronting political violence, economic insecurity and an uncertain future.
Future Nausea takes some of its musical cues from the widescreen tradition of American rock, but rejects the nostalgia often associated with that sound. Rather than looking backwards towards an idealised past, Spanish Love Songs focus on the anxieties surrounding what is ahead.
Singer and guitarist Dylan Slocum describes the record as the band’s attempt to make a major rock album while retaining an explicitly political edge. The result, according to Slocum, is intended to be more angry than sad, marking a shift in emotional emphasis from some of the band’s previous work.
That tension is central to Good American, a song Slocum identifies as one of the album’s thematic foundations.
Slocum says Good American was partly inspired by veterans he encountered while delivering pizzas to a Veterans Affairs hospital during the height of the War on Terror. More recently, stories concerning restrictions affecting transgender service members prompted memories of conversations he had heard two decades earlier.
The song examines what Slocum sees as the consequences when institutions that appeal to patriotism, economic desperation and belonging subsequently abandon the people who have relied on them.
“It’s an angry song,” Slocum says, describing it as potentially the angriest song he has written. The band responded musically by keeping the recording deliberately minimal and loud, with the intention of recreating the physical energy of a crowded basement performance.
Good American establishes the album’s central tension: confronting difficult political realities without allowing the music itself to become defeated by them.
Future Nausea follows 2020’s Brave Faces Everyone and 2023’s No Joy, continuing a progression that has seen Spanish Love Songs broaden their arrangements without abandoning their punk foundation.
The band’s latest full-length draws on the scale of albums such as Bruce Springsteen’s Born In The U.S.A., The Killers’ Sam’s Town and Tom Petty’s Full Moon Fever. Shimmering keyboards, ringing guitars and large choruses provide the musical setting for Slocum’s often stark observations.
The opening title track introduces the record with Meredith Van Woert’s synthesiser lines before the rest of the band enters, creating the effect of a rock performance building instrument by instrument. Living Blues and Good American use rolling bass and four-on-the-floor rhythms, while New Fears is driven by pounding percussion.
Elsewhere, Welcome To Hell shifts towards a more expansive anthem. Jan666 and No Dreams address the experience of losing someone not through death, but through political radicalisation, border enforcement and movements that place them increasingly far from the person they once were.
Doom Tripping offers a different response to that despair. Its central idea is that even a post-apocalyptic world does not necessarily mean the end of dancing, placing human connection and communal experience at the centre of the album’s outlook.
Spanish Love Songs formed in Los Angeles in 2013, initially as a trio before Kyle McAulay joined. Meredith Van Woert became part of the group in 2017, completing the five-piece configuration that has continued through the band’s subsequent development. Mike Trujillo joined on bass in 2025.
The group released Giant Sings the Blues in 2015, followed by Schmaltz in 2018. Brave Faces Everyone expanded their audience in 2020, while Brave Faces, Etc. presented substantially reworked versions of that album in 2022.
No Joy followed in 2023, while the band returned in 2025 with the collaborative EP A Brief Intermission in the Flattening of Time. That release included appearances from Kevin Devine, Tigers Jaw and Illuminati Hotties, the latter connecting directly with Tudzin’s role on the new album.
Over the past decade, Spanish Love Songs have toured with acts including The Wonder Years, Rise Against, Alkaline Trio, The Menzingers and Hot Mulligan, as well as appearing at Furnace Fest, 2000trees and the revived Vans Warped Tour.
For Spanish Love Songs, Future Nausea is ultimately concerned with the relationship between political circumstances and personal survival. Its songs examine institutions, ideology and economic pressure, but repeatedly return to the importance of people remaining connected.
Slocum says the relationships between individuals are what matter when circumstances become isolating. That perspective gives the record a counterpoint to its darker subject matter and explains why songs built around anxiety are delivered through direct, communal rock arrangements.
Future Nausea will be released on 6 November via Pure Noise Records. Good American provides the first indication of how Spanish Love Songs intend to approach the next chapter: louder, more politically confrontational and musically expansive, while retaining the personal perspective that has defined the band since its formation.
Future Nausea Tracklisting
Future Nausea
Good American
Welcome To Hell
New Fears
Living Blues
Jan666
Doom Tripping
Shadowland
No Dreams
Future Nausea Pt.2
See You On The Way Out
Until The Sun Explodes
Stay updated with your free Noise11.com daily music news email alert. Subscribe to Noise11 Music News here
Be the first to see NOISE11.com’s newest interviews and special features on YouTube. See things first—Subscribe to Noise11 on YouTube
Follow Noise11.com on social media:
Bluesky
Facebook – Comment on the news of the day
