No Hope Kids

Michael Barrios has been making music since he was fifteen, and under the moniker No Hope Kids for the majority of that time. Now 21, he’s working on an EP and his second full-length album simultaneously.

“Alternative pop is what I’ve been doing lately,” he tells me at our meeting in central San Diego. “I like to mess with different genres in each song. It used to just kind of be myself with an acoustic guitar, and I’d play a couple of basic chords and sing over them, and now

I’m really into the whole getting on Logic and just layering a bunch of shit until I make something really huge. So I’ve basically expanded my instrumentation.”

Michael is also adding in mostly-unused instruments in the genre he’s pursuing. “I get bored playing the same thing over and over again. The way I like to create is, every single song I do, I like to add one thing that I’ve never done before. On my last album, I had a kind of straightforward eighties synth-pop song, and I wanted to, in the bridge, add some tribal drummers, just because I had never done it before.” On this upcoming album, he’s planning on including “mad trumpets and shit.”

As for any advice on musicians just starting out? “Do whatever the hell you want.,” Michael says. “That’s kind of the beauty of it: there are no rules.”

Find No Hope Kids’ music on Bandcamp (nhkband)