Cheating Boyfriends Brought Together Spain's Garage Rock Band Deers

At first Deers’ Ana Garcia Perrote and Carlotta Cosials weren’t sure if they’d share their music with the world, but after posting two of their songs to SoundCloud one night, there was no going back. People immediately took notice. The two songs—“Bamboo” and “Trippy Gum”—were an ass-kicking introduction to the Madrid-based pair, showing off the girls’ garage rock influences from Ty Segall to the Thee Oh Sees.

Ana and Carlotta met through ex-boyfriends and friends but it wasn’t until they took a trip together to the coast of Spain that Deers was born. Drawing on their past relationships, they hammered out their feelings in grungy, raw pop gems packed with attitude. They’ve since dialed up their girl-power rock, expanding their lineup to include Ade Martin and Ámber Grimbergen. With these new additions, the band has revamped their sonic outlook, musing on their love for life and their love of love. “We’re really connected. It’s a way of life,” Ana says of the band. “It’s a relaxed and happy life. It’s about not caring and having fun. We started as girls having fun, and it works.”

We spoke with Ana and Carlotta about cheating ex-boyfriends, recording with the Vaccines, and getting trippy.

It seems like you guys came out of nowhere with a bang. How did you get on people’s radars? Have you guys been playing a lot of shows in Europe?
Ana: We just uploaded two songs one night and started receiving emails. We don’t even know what to say because we don’t know how it happened.

Did you self-record? Your tracks sound DIY but also quite polished.
Ana: We have a friend called Diego that has a band called The Parrots. They were playing with us, and he studied something in sound, so he recorded us. It was an afternoon and we were giving ideas to him.
Carlotta: It was very DIY, but we have friends.
Ana: It was very improvised with the drums and bass. Carlotta played the drums and I played the bass. It was DIY, but different.

How did you come up with the name Deers?
Carlotta: It is kind of funny to explain it in English. In Spanish, there’s an expression that when your boyfriend cheats on you with another girl, you have horns. [laughs]!

So did that happen to one of you or both of you
Carlotta: We had horns around our lives [laughs]!

Did this project come out of you guys trying to get back at those boyfriends?
Ana and Carlotta: [laughs]
Ana: No, no. We’re just obsessed with bands. We have many friends in music, and we just really, really wanted to play. We just knew we could do it.

On that note, who are some of your influences?
Carlotta: Okay. Maybe not in order, but I’m going to say Mac DeMarco, Ty Segall, Shannon and the Clams and Devendra Banhart. The Growlers. Black Lips. Thee Oh Sees. We’ve grown up listening to all of this music around us. Every weekend we have shows to go to. We go to venues, see your friends play and we learned a lot of things from our friends. It was pretty amazing for us.
Ana: We admire our friends a lot.

Does Spain play a big part in influencing your music?
Carlotta: I don’t think that it’s the music from Spain, but it’s the people from Spain, the food from Spain, the beaches from Spain, but not the music. We have it in our blood. We have little things that come from Spain in the way we move.

So do you guys have an EP or LP coming out?
Ana and Carlotta: Yeah!
Carlotta: We’re writing songs now, and we don’t know when or how, but we’re probably going to release an album next year in 2015.

What are the stories behind “Trippy Gum” and “Bamboo?”
Carlotta: Okay. “Trippy Gum” is the first song we wrote. It’s [about] a night we had together. It’s a little metaphoric, but it’s a night we ere doing PR for a pub. When we finished the work and went to the bar, we had four tickets for full drinks and finished vodka-tonics in one hour. It was very fast. Everything was crazy. It was just the two of us, and something went wrong [laughs].

I was wondering if you guys dropped acid or something.
Carlotta: Well, not that night. [laughs] “Bamboo” is more from the heart. Our relationships.
Ana: It’s about love and affection.

What’s the story behind your single cover? It looks like a vintage Polaroid. It’s great.
Ana: Thank you so much! The photo was taken after our second gig.
Carlotta: When it was just Ana and I, the second show, we were backstage and we took the photo backstage. We didn’t pose or anything.

Are you guys planning to come to the U.S.? Who would you love to tour with?
Carlotta: I’d really love to support Black Lips.
Ana: All of the bands we talked about. We were saying last week that we probably made this band to be friends with all of the bands we talked about before. We just were talking about how we were in love with all of the bands we admire.

What’s the craziest experience you’ve had so far as Deers?
Ana: The best or the weirdest?

Both.
Ana: The best I would say London. We met The Vaccines and recorded a song with them. We sold-out a show there and it was great. The weird one was Berlin, maybe.
Carlotta: Berlin was kind of weird. We arrived to a place, like an old barn. There was no floor and no lights. We had no instruments. We played with other people’s instruments and they were broken.
Ana: We had so much fun, but Berlin is weird.

Ilana Kaplan is a writer living in Brooklyn. She's on Twitter - @lanikaps.