It took a minute—five years, if you’re counting—but The Kills are back with God Games, and they don’t want your apology for the wait. “Nobody was more frustrated than me and Alison,” Jamie Hince says. “But let’s be fair. There was a pandemic. A death experience. All of it.”
And yet somehow, they’ve emerged with their most beguiling record in years—at turns haunted, philosophical, chaotic, and straight-up lush. The trick? New instruments, old instincts. “I don’t know how to play the keyboard,” Alison Mosshart says, “but I wrote every song I wrote on the keyboard. I got sucked into it and refused to come out.” Hince adds, “We’ve always believed that less ability means more ideas. You throw away what you're good at, and your brain starts filling in the gaps.”
That self-imposed clumsiness led to a record that flirts with collapse—but never falls apart. “You can’t fake an accident,” Mosshart says. “But you can put yourself in the kind of headspace where accidents happen.” That meant jettisoning guitars until the final week of recording, embracing first-take vocals, and recording in a London church—though not the romantic part of it. “We hated the upstairs. All those stained-glass windows reminding you it was daytime,” Jamie says with a shudder. “We moved to the basement. That’s where we belonged. Down there.”
Despite the setting, the record was already written by the time they hit the studio. “The concept of ‘godless spirituals’ was just something that started creeping into the lyrics,” Alison says. “After the pandemic, I wanted to feel something extreme—adrenaline, edge, beauty. That tension made its way into everything.”
Take “103,” one of the album’s standouts. It started on that mystery keyboard in her living room and never got re-recorded. “That vocal is the first take I did on GarageBand the day I wrote it. We were in this expensive studio with amazing gear and I was like—nope. Use the demo. It has the feeling.”
The feeling, as it turns out, is where their limitations collide. “Alison was writing in all these major keys. But I had a hand injury—I can’t make major chords anymore, only minors,” Jamie explains. “So I’m laying minor progressions over major melodies. That tension—that’s the record.”
And then there’s “LA Hex,” their accidental Halloween anthem. “The city got witchy,” Alison says with a smirk. “You feel it in the winter. There’s smoke from chimneys, weird energy in the air. You don’t know if it’s good or bad, but it’s taking you somewhere.” Is it Halloween music? Jamie half-protests, but he’s already lost. “My mind is a haunted house,” Mosshart laughs. Checkmate.
They brought in longtime friend Paul Epworth to produce—full circle, since Epworth was once their sound guy and produced their debut, Keep on Your Mean Side, now 20 years old. Does this new one speak to that first record?
“I think it does,” Jamie says. “Of course, I’m also pulling ideas now from things that didn’t exist back then—Frank Ocean’s song structures, MF DOOM’s production. But then you hear ‘Bullet Sound’ or ‘Love and Tenderness,’ and yeah… that’s 2002.”
There’s no mistaking the DNA. But God Games doesn’t coast on nostalgia—it mutates it. The Kills don’t do legacy albums. “When I hear our old records, they bring me back to that exact time,” Alison says. “But when we play them live, they feel totally new again. And that’s because of the people—it's the audience. Some of them just discovered Keep on Your Mean Side last year. That changes how we hear it, too.”
It’s that balance—accident and intent, old and new, dark and ecstatic—that defines The Kills now. They’re still swaggering, still snarling, still finding beauty in the basement. Only now, the ghosts sound a little clearer.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
