Alison Mosshart might be quarantined, but creatively speaking, she’s been out of the house for months. The Kills and Dead Weather frontwoman is suddenly solo, releasing the scorching, blues-soaked track “Rise” as her first official single under her own name. The twist? She actually wrote it back in 2013. “I was missing someone, things were bad,” she says. “I was trying to believe there was light at the end of the tunnel.”
The track’s revival came courtesy of Sacred Lies, a Facebook Watch series that licensed the song for a key moment in its season finale. But “Rise” had already lived several lives in the show—various characters sang their own versions of it before Mosshart was asked to record her own proper take. “They loved it,” she says. “Then I finally got the chance to do my version—the way I saw the song.”
She calls it “empowering,” though not in the soft, sanitized way that word usually lands. “Even when I’m showing support in this song,” she laughs, “it sounds menacing. That’s menacing support.” That’s about right. Mosshart’s blues is always a little dirty, always half-shadow. You believe her when she says she wrote it for herself first—just to get through something.
The b-side, “It Ain’t Water,” is even newer and, in her words, “more recent, more personal.” A song she sang to herself for years as a reminder that she could finish what she started. “It just kind of fell out of my mouth,” she says. “I used to sing it when I couldn’t finish a song.”
Recording it was a dream, thanks to producer Alain Johannes, whose resume (Mark Lanegan, PJ Harvey) reads like a Mosshart mixtape. He showed up to the session with what looked like forest debris—sticks, leaves, strange objects that might’ve been used in a pagan ritual. “It looked like something he collected from the woods,” she laughs. “But then he lays it all down, and suddenly your brain sees 500 people marching through the woods. Cinematic as hell.”
That word comes up a lot—cinematic—and with good reason. Mosshart’s solo work has largely been shaped through film and TV. Earlier this year, she contributed “I Don’t Know” to The Turning soundtrack, a place she’s getting comfortable. “Songs are colors and shapes and dark and light to me,” she explains. “They play out like scenes.”
It helps that she’s not just writing music—she’s also making her own videos. After teaching herself iMovie (“Every tutorial told me: No, you can’t do that”), she graduated to Final Cut Pro and started experimenting with concepts and visuals. “The video for ‘It Ain’t Water’ is really conceptual,” she says. “Almost one continuous shot. It’s completely different than ‘Rise.’”
And it’s not stopping there. Mosshart’s 2019 art-and-cars book Carma is getting a reissue through Third Man Books, and she’s recorded a strange spoken word album to accompany it. “Less like a spoken word record and more like weird recordings inspired by the book,” she says. Think characters. Think voices. Think something halfway between a fanzine and a fever dream.
“I used to record myself having fake conversations with myself in high school,” she says. “Different voices, different accents. I’ve always done that.” Now it’s become a whole multimedia rabbit hole—audio, visuals, characters. “I’m obsessed,” she grins. “I want to make mini videos for all of them.”
And yes, she’s still a Kill. A new record is slowly taking shape, though both she and Jamie Hince are in exploration mode. “I know about four songs,” she says. “He’s got a bunch more he hasn’t played me yet—he’s very secretive until things are ready.” So far, she can’t describe the direction, but it’s safe to expect that it’ll sound nothing like the last one.
Mosshart has always been one of those rare artists who actually means it when she says she wants to do something different. She doesn’t just say the words—she lives them. “The Kills is jamming together two totally opposite things,” she says. “We write separately. So when we meet in the middle, it’s like building a bridge—architecturally.”
Her influences remain wide open: Kendrick Lamar, Future, alt-R&B, dub production. “Why does rock still sound like Nirvana or the Rolling Stones?” she asks. “Pop music is where the experimentation is now. R&B, hip-hop—that’s where the freaky shit’s happening.”
Her career’s become a constellation—solo songs here, art books there, experimental sound pieces and future Kills records orbiting in the background. She’s not sure what it adds up to yet. “I don’t think I need a retrospective just yet,” she jokes. “I’ve got so much left to do.”
It’s the kind of chaos that only makes sense when you see the whole thing from above. Cinematic, you might say. And Mosshart? She’s the one calling the shots now. Every voice. Every frame. Every shade of sound.
Listen to the interview above and then check out the videos below.
