The title Ash & Ice sounds like it should come with a myth, a bonfire, maybe a tragic cabin fire in winter. Instead, it came from a cigarette stubbed out in a drink. Jamie Hince laughed about it immediately. “It probably needs a better story at this point,” he said. Alison Mosshart, naturally, offered one on the spot: the house burns down, it’s winter, they’re standing in the ashes. Obviously. That’s how these things work. Titles, like songs, sometimes just show up and then slowly start pretending they meant something all along.
That loose, accidental origin fits the record. Ash & Ice sounds deliberate, yes, but not precious. It’s a band pushing itself sideways instead of forward, tugging electric guitar music away from its own clichés and into a space where dub production, R&B textures, and negative space matter as much as riffs. The Kills have always sworn they don’t repeat themselves, a line plenty of bands say while quietly remaking the same album forever. With them, though, it’s less manifesto and more compulsion. “I’m not confident enough to stick to one thing,” Hince admitted. “I can’t concentrate on one thing.”
He said it almost apologetically, then started naming the bands who did stick to one thing—Nick Cave, The Cramps—with real affection. That clarity, that trust in a lane, is something he admires. It’s just not something he’s wired for. Especially not now, not with guitar music stuck in a loop while hip-hop and pop keep mutating in public.
Hince didn’t dance around it. “Hip-hop is going crazy right now,” he said, name-checking Future and Kendrick Lamar without hesitation. R&B was pushing outward. Pop was experimenting openly. Guitar music, meanwhile, felt trapped between nostalgia and muscle memory. “It still sounds like either Nirvana or the Rolling Stones,” he shrugged. Not wrong.
What fascinated him most was where innovation was coming from. Movements used to rise from basements and vans. This time, they felt top-down. When artists like Jay-Z and Beyoncé started bending form, it gave everyone else permission to follow. Suddenly, the center was unstable again. That energy seeps into Ash & Ice, even if it never announces itself as “influenced by pop.” You can hear it in the space, the restraint, the refusal to fill every corner with guitar.
Hince described wanting something almost heretical: a guitar record with dub instincts. “Like Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry production on a guitar record,” he said, invoking Lee Scratch Perry as a north star rather than a blueprint. The idea wasn’t genre tourism. It was collision. Take R&B production, lay it over blues structures. Take weight away from the guitar instead of adding more pedals. Let the song breathe.
That tension is built into how The Kills work. Mosshart and Hince write separately, often from opposite poles. “My songs are always polar opposite from what Jamie’s writing,” Mosshart said. The band exists in the act of forcing those worlds together—not with a hammer, but, as she put it, with “a beautiful, gilded bridge.” She caught herself mid-metaphor and smiled. There’s your poetry. The architecture matters.
The stakes got higher when Hince’s hand started failing him. Trigger finger. Cortisone shots. A slammed car door. Then the real nightmare: a deep bone infection, a lost tendon, surgery. The kind of story musicians tell quietly, if at all. “One in ten million,” he said, like he’d won a particularly cursed lottery. He joked through it, but the implication was obvious: what happens to a guitar band when the guitar player can’t play?
His answer was pure stubbornness. He didn’t panic. He bought studio gear. “I thought I’d just be a one-handed producer,” he said, ready to chain himself to the desk and keep going. When other people’s faces started showing real fear, that’s when it hit him—maybe this was serious. Still, he never fully believed the band would end. “I’m really, really positive,” he said, almost surprised by himself.
As it turned out, guitar didn’t abandon him. He adapted. Found a way. History, after all, is full of players who worked around limitations. He even dragged Django Reinhardt into the conversation. The instrument bends if you insist hard enough.
That insistence shows up all over Ash & Ice, especially in its sequencing. “Hum for Your Buzz” sits dead center, a palate cleanser that feels like the album’s hinge. They almost opened with it. Then thought better of it. Attention spans, after all. Vinyl still mattered to Mosshart—she kept thinking in sides, even as the world pretended sides no longer existed. Then the record became a double LP, four sides, just to complicate things further.
And yes, “Doing It to Death” made at least one listener snort-laugh like a 14-year-old. Hince hadn’t even clocked the double entendre. Someone else called it tongue-in-cheek. He shrugged again. Meaning, like titles, arrives late sometimes.
What Ash & Ice proves is that The Kills weren’t interested in saving guitar music by polishing it. They were more interested in stressing it, bending it, seeing what happened if you took cues from everywhere else instead of looking backward. It’s a record born out of accident, injury, curiosity, and a refusal to sit still—and it sounds exactly like that.
Watch the full interview above and then check out the video below.
