They’re the most fearless duo in rock & roll: enigmatic, multi-faceted, minimalist. Jamie Hince (guitar/vox, hails from England) and Alison Mosshart (vocals, USA born and bred) are The Kills, and Frontier Touring is thrilled to announce their long-awaited return to Australia this July.
With their highly anticipated fifth album, Ash & Ice, set for release on Friday 3 June (via Domino Recording Co), The Kills will perform two headline dates in Australia – Melbourne’s Forum Theatre on Saturday 23 July, and Sydney’s Enmore Theatre on Tuesday 26 July. The headline dates follow the band’s appearance at Byron Bay’s sold-out Splendour In The Grass festival. With the band’s 2011 Australian tour selling out across three dates, don’t delay in grabbing your ticket this visit!
With single ‘Doing It To Death’ out now, Ash & Ice was recorded in Hince’s rented Los Angeles home and at New York City’s infamous Electric Lady Studios, produced by Hince and John O’Mahoney (Metric, The Cribs). It’s the band’s first album in five years, and their fifth long player.
From the raw spareness of 2003 debut album Keep On Your Mean Side (which introduced us with tracks like ‘Fried My Little Brains’) to 2005’s unwavering No Wow, 2008’s Midnight Boom (which saw singles like ‘U R A Fever’) and 2011’s Blood Pressures (‘Satellite’ and ‘Future Starts Slow’), The Kills bristle with tension, anxiety, sex, and unstudied cool. The 13-track Ash & Ice is another excellent statement – this time laid down under California’s blue sky and palm trees, quite the change from the band’s usual recording space at Key Club Studio in Benton Harbor, Michigan.
“I wanted there to be more soul, more groove in it,” Hince told the Village Voice in a recent interview of the journey to Ash & Ice. To begin, Hince found himself with an unexpected challenge: six surgeries, a tendon transplant, and 18 months of rehab to heal a broken finger, following a car door slam. “He couldn’t play guitar,” Mosshart recalls of her bandmate, who “began buying all these funny instruments that you would only need one hand to play.” It was during this period of recovery that Hince first began mapping out songs, including ‘Let It Begin’.
He also embarked on a 9,650km train trip – solo – on the Trans-Siberian Express, where ‘Siberian Nights’ and other songs were born. “I wanted to go away somewhere on my own and find out what I had in me,” Hince says. “I took my guitar, all my notebooks and a camera. I had this vision of the record being this icy, paranoid record as I was travelling through Siberia. But the rest of the songs are more about the emotion, the struggle.”
Mosshart meanwhile was busy relocating to Nashville, recording, and on the road touring with The Dead Weather – her explosive side project with Jack White. Also an acclaimed visual artist, in 2015 she staged her first solo show, ‘Fire Power’, at New York’s Joseph Gross Gallery, featuring painting, drawing, mixed media and tapestries. Constantly writing for The Kills since their last release, Mosshart was determined the pair would head in a brand new direction. “If Ash & Ice were a painting, it would be incredibly complex. It would be one that looked like it had been painted over and over and over and over. It would be so thick off the wall, it would be coming through the frame.”
Currently on tour in the US and with festival dates locked in the world over, these exclusive headline shows are not to be missed and are The Kills’ first visit in five years. Don’t delay – tickets go on sale Thursday 28 April!
The Kills
With special guests to be announced
Sat 23 Jul – Forum Theatre, Melbourne, VIC (18+)
Tue 26 Jul – Enmore Theatre, Sydney, NSW (All Ages)