Giovannie and the Hired Guns

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Since their inception in 2015, Giovannie and The Hired Guns have made a blockbuster career out of wildly defying expectations. With a visceral sound that merges alt-metal, Red Dirt country, Latin pop, Americana, and much more, the Stephenville, Texas-based five-piece have ascended from playing local honky-tonks to taking the stage at major festivals and arenas across the country, drawing an ardent crowd ranging from cowboys to metalheads to skate punks. As they continue their colossal rise—a journey that’s included scoring a No. 1 radio hit with their smash single “Ramon Ayala” and winning the 2023 iHeartRadio Music Award for Best New Artist in Alternative & Rock—Giovannie and The Hired Guns now return with their new album Land of the Lost: a body of work that pushes the boundaries with even more intensity, matching its explosive riffs and unforgettable hooks with the band’s most brutally honest songwriting to date.

Produced by Johnny K (Megadeth, Sevendust, Plain White T’s), Land of the Lost marks the fourth full-length from Giovannie and The Hired Guns (frontman Giovannie Yanez, guitarists Carlos Villa and Jerrod Flusche, bassist/tuba player Alex Trejo, and drummer/pianist Milton Toles) and second LP since signing with Warner Music Nashville through a first-of-its-kind partnership with Warner Music Latina. While the band have always brought a powerful emotionality to their lyrics, the album embodies an unfiltered urgency that has much to do with Yanez’s processing a number of life-altering troubles in real-time, including the death of a close friend and his own relapse into addiction. Recorded at the famed Sonic Ranch (a residential studio near the Mexican border in Tornillo, Texas), Land of the Lost ultimately supplies the kind of catharsis that can only come from exorcising your demons and bravely moving toward a better future. “When I first listened back to this album I realized I wasn’t all there for some of the songs; I was so blinded by the suppressants that I thought were helping me out,” Yanez admits. “But it feels good to look back and know that I made it out to the other side. I hope it ends up helping people realize that there’s always hope no matter how bad things seem. There’s always a tomorrow.”

The follow-up to 2022’s Tejano Punk Boyz, Land of the Lost finds Giovannie and The Hired Guns doubling down on the freewheeling attitude they first embraced in their earliest days as a band, back when Yanez was working the counter at a nearby pawnshop. “From the beginning I told the guys not to worry about sounding too rock or too country on this record,” Yanez recalls. “We just went in there and had fun and didn’t let anything hold us back, and because of that the album shows the full range of what we can do as a band.” Immediately delivering on that promise, Land of the Lost opens on the galvanizing rhythms and throat-shredding vocals of “Cheap Tequila”: a ferocious yet fun-loving track that speaks an unvarnished truth about their shared life experience. “I wrote that song thinking about us in our younger days, when we were all broke and working these mid-paying jobs,” says Yanez. “There’s a feeling of not really caring what’s going to happen next—you’re just living for today, waiting for your next paycheck so you can go out and get drunk again.”

Throughout Land of the Lost, Giovannie and The Hired Guns reveal their rare ability to channel painful self-reflection into songs with all the raw exuberance of a fist-pumping party anthem. On “Quitter,” for instance, Yanez closely details the confusion and loneliness of dealing with addiction (“Something’s really wrong with me/And I don’t wanna talk about my history/Just crush ’em up so we can live happily”), but brilliantly twists the mood at the track’s sing-along-ready and strangely carefree chorus (“I’m not a quitter/But I wish I was”). “Everything kind of clicked for this album after we wrote ‘Quitter,’” Yanez points out. “Jerrod came up with a riff and I just jumped in and started singing those opening lines: ‘Here we go again/Pass me a Xan.’ It was exactly what I was going through at the time, but I didn’t even mean for it to come out.”