The crunching sparsity of The Kills will be back for more high gain action with VV and Hotel’s fifth studio album, Ash And Ice. As a band that keeps its releases as tightly honed as its music, you don’t get too much in the way of new material, so when it comes around it’s worth getting a bit bright eyed about.
It’s been five years since Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince last put out a record in 2011’s Blood Pressures, and a scary nine since the wonders of Midnight Boom landed, so things have moved on in the meantime. However, from the sound of things there’s still plenty of room for stripped back super style, garage rock hooks, significant experimentation and electric guitar/lyric interplay.
Release date
Ash And Ice will be released on the 3rd June 2016, which was confirmed when The Kills put out the announcement in an email to fans on the 1st March 2016. It’ll be available on CD, vinyl LP and digital download. The deluxe version of the LP is a limited edition exclusive to The Kills store and comes as a 2 disc LP in colored vinyl – one blue swirl and one pink swirl – with a pretty cool jacket and its own lyric artwork.
Singles
If the announcement of the new album wasn’t enough to get cheerful over, The Kills accompanied it with the first single, Doing It To Death, which we’re pretty keen on. It’s nowhere near as lo-fi as the brilliant U.R.A. Fever or Tape Song, but it’s still as much an assault to the senses as the band’s previous best. You can take a listen to the track yourself in the YouTube vid below.
The music video is a macabre song and dance of a funeral ride that looks like a noire musical under a bright blue sky, taking juxtaposition to the extreme. As with the song, the video’s production values have been ramped up in comparison to previous output, which feels like it may have been influenced by Mosshart’s recent productions with The Deadweather on I Feel Love.
Ash And Ice tracklist:
- Doing It To Death
- Heart of a Dog
- Hard Habit to Break
- Bitter Fruit
- Days of Why and How
- Let it Drop
- Hum for your Buzz
- Siberian Nights
- That Love
- Impossible Tracks
- Black Tar
- Echo Home
- Whirling Eye
UK gigs
For anyone hoping to get to see the delights of Ash And Ice played live in the UK, the good news is that there will be an opportunity, but the bad news is that there’s just one of them at the moment. The Kills has just one gig over here in its forward looking travel plans, which will see the band playing the Village Underground in London on the 4th May 2016, just under a month ahead of the album’s release date.
First impressions
For us there’s not much The Kills can do wrong, even when they’re getting much more moola to make their music videos. While there’s an element of nostalgia for their exceptional back catalogue, we’re glad things are progressing and we’ll be very surprised if there aren’t more new developments, along with a few more links to their musical past on Ash And Ice.
