It’s load-in time for The Kills, who are currently at the beginning stages of a world tour in support of their fifth studio album,Ash & Ice.
For the New York-based American/English duo, setting up shows was a lot simpler back in their early 2000s origins. “We literally just had two amps, a couple of microphones and our little drum machine,” recalls Jamie Hince, the band’s guitarist, otherwise known under the alias Hotel. “We could get everything around on a Greyhound bus or on the tube if we needed to. It was a lot more compact.” And now? “There have been people here all day setting up our whole light show,” he says, watching them work as he awaits soundcheck.
“I’m amazed at the amount of fucking gear that we have. Lights, monitors, you name it. We have a truck full of stuff, we have a bus full of stuff that gets us around – hell, these days my guitar is going through four amps. Four amps! Can you imagine that? For a band that’s been lauded as being minimal – y’know, just always being a two-piece – it just blows my mind how much stuff our crew are lugging around behind us.”
Despite the many things that have changed as far as The Kills – completed by vocalist Alison ‘VV’ Mosshart – are concerned, Hince does recognise one constant. “Back in the day, we’d look out into the front few rows and there were all these 18-, 19-year-old kids that were super into the show and knew all the words to the songs,” he says. “I look out now during shows, and I’m seeing the exact same thing – these kids that are just loving it. The fact that we still mean anything to young people is a pretty cool feeling.”
Ash & Ice follows five years on from The Kills’ last LP, Blood Pressures – an album that, after years of existing on the fringe, saw the band finally accepted and noticed by a wider audience. It cracked the charts globally, including a top ten position in France and top 20 slots in Belgium and Switzerland. However, Hince rejects any suggestion that Ash & Ice took The Kills so long due to uncertainty over how to follow their most successful LP.
“It’s certainly not as if we haven’t seen each other or anything like that since then,” he says. “We toured Blood Pressures for two-and-a-half years. We were doing all these big tours – The Black Keys, Arctic Monkeys, Queens of the Stone Age, Jack White. We’re a touring band; that’s where most of our action is. We’re not working on a schedule. Alison knows when I’m in the zone and working on new music – she can tell when it’s time. She can see my brain working. There’s gonna be a whole period of time where she doesn’t know what the fuck I’m doing, but then it all comes together when we’re in the studio together. Suddenly, she’ll totally get why I was off just listening to digital dancehall for a month or whatever. That’s when we throw her songs into the mix and see what happens.”
As much as the duality of Mosshart and Hince’s vocals have served as a definitive trait of The Kills’ sound, it’s Hince’s guitar work that has often been the foundation. From the down-tuned snarl of ‘Fried My Little Brains’ to the groove-driven twang of ‘Future Starts Slow’, Hince is the kind of guitarist who is incredibly easy to pick out of a line. This continues into Ash & Ice, which is full of amp-shredding staccato and cleverly inverted fretboard runs. What is it exactly that makes Hince stand out from the pack?
“I think it’s all in the rhythm,” he says. “I’ve never been a big fan of having layers and layers of guitars on a song – if a band’s got one guitar player, then I want to distinctly hear that guitar. I think that’s why I started using my thumb when I was playing, picking out melodies on the higher strings with my spare fingers. I said right at the beginning of the band that, no matter what kind of music that we ended up making, it had to have a certain swagger to it. I think we’re at a point now that, no matter what we do, it’s just going to end up sounding like us. We could bring in a string quartet and it would still end up just sounding like The Kills.”
The stage is set for Hince and Mosshart to return to Australian shores this coming July. Along with some key headlining dates, they will also be performing at Splendour In The Grass – the festival that hosted the duo’s last performance here, fresh from the release of Blood Pressures back in 2011.
“I wish we could come down more often,” laments Hince. “The reality is that we can only really do Australia and New Zealand once per album cycle. That means that we really have to make it count, y’know? The last time we were out was one of my fondest memories, actually. I’d just gotten married, and my wife [now former partner Kate Moss] came with us around the country. It was like an extended honeymoon – we loved it.”
The Kills’Ash & Ice is out Friday June 3 through Domino; and they appear at Enmore Theatre, on Tuesday July 26, after Splendour In The Grass 2016, North Byron Parklands, Friday July 22 – Sunday July 24.
