With a name like The Kills, maybe it’s only fitting that Alison “VV” Mosshart and Jamie “Hotel” Hince suffer for their art. Making their third album, Midnight Boom, they both agree, was “hellish.” After a failed songwriting jaunt to Los Angeles—they loathed it—the duo shuttled back and forth between their deadly cool neighborhood in London and the flat-out dead town of Benton Harbor, MI, with a breakdown escape to Mexico in between, before arriving at their final destination. It took several years, and a mighty toll on their finances and romances.

The French model that Hince had been dating dropped out along the way, and their bank accounts hovered dangerously close to zero. By the time it was all over, however, Hince had moved on—he’s now “Page Six”-worthy thanks to his current bed partner, Kate Moss—and the duo had come up with its most thrilling music yet.

“I was determined not to make a retro record,” notes Hince. “On our first two records, we’d worn our influences on our sleeve quite a bit. Our first record was very sort of Velvet Underground. Our second record was very Cabaret Voltaire and Suicide. I wanted to dispense with as much of that as I could. We wanted to be forward-thinking.”

"We wanted to do something that we’d never heard before,” confers Mosshart.

The album—a mixture of darkness and light, at once gritty and tender—came from a surprising source, says Hince. “We stumbled across these playground songs. The rhythms of them are all like ‘la la la la la’ with hand-clapping,” he says, slapping his palms together for effect. “And yet the lyrics come from the deep, dark social climate that they’re involved in, so they’re all songs about life and death, domestic violence and miscarriages. You hear these little girls singing cheerful songs with these really strong melodies and the bottom line is that the themes are really super dark and tragic and sad. ‘Sour Cherry,’ ‘Cheap and Cheerful,’ and ‘Alphabet Pony’ are our versions of these kinds of playground songs—playground songs with a murderous twist.”

Being holed up for months on end in the “burnt-out town” of Benton Harbor clearly had some effect on the record. “The studio, Key Club, is on main street, where there are no cars, no nothing. You just sit on the sidewalk,” recalls Mosshart. “There’s a prison on one end of town, a mental institution on the other end, so you get really interesting characters walking down the sidewalk past the front door, knocking on the window, talking to you very slowly.”

“It’s my favorite working environment I’ve ever found in my life,” continues Mosshart, who originally hails from Florida. “That’s the only place I want to work. It’s open all night, no one bothers you, our two best friends own it—built it with their own hands.” She describes the live-in studio as “a crazy art-chaos scene,” with typewriters and collage-making supplies scattered about. Hince designed what his songwriting partner refers to as an “English gypsy room,” complete with a thrift-store Union Jack proudly hanging on the wall, and classic Stones albums like Let It Bleed scattered about. “So much of the imagery that I’d been so drawn to in the past had been American and it wasn’t my history,” concedes Hince. “So I was really determined to make an honest record, with the Union Jack above my head and English memorabilia around me. I was sleeping in the same room I was recording in. I had my amps, my MPC, and drum machine in there. And I just put down a little mattress. It was like being homeless, but in a studio.”

The self-imposed isolation gave them time to think and space to use their imagination. It’s not like there was much else to do, anyway, other than dig into bowls of “fried brown things with luminous red and yellow sauces” at the one local bar, says Hince, relishing the memory. “There’s not even a movie theater to go to,” confirms Mosshart. “Although we did go bowling a few times. That ruled.” For her, that is. “I was bowling left-handed because I grew my nails to such great lengths to play guitar and it was like, Here, can you bowl with this hand?” says Hince, “So I was at a disadvantage. And nobody really understood that. They were just like, ‘You’re shit at bowling.’ And I was like, ‘I’m doing this for my art.’ And then I’d go back and play the most incredible guitar and they’d still be moaning about the fucking bowling. Unbelievable.”

Photo by Klaus Thymann