Maybe it’s pre-first-show-of-the-tour jitters and excitement, but Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince, better known collectively as The Kills, are in a fantastic mood. They’ve spent the day wandering about in Portland, Maine, host to the kick-off of the garage rock duo’s U.S. tour. The bulk of the run will be as support for Queens of the Stone Age – including a pair of nights at MGM Music Hall at Fenway this evening (June 10) and tomorrow (June 11). As we lay out the concept of the 617 Q&A, which begins with six questions, Mosshart jumps in.
“And then one story, and then seven jokes?” she asks.
Hince perks up at the possibility, but alas, it’s a format followed by one recommendation and then a seven of something uniquely tailored just to The Kills, who last came through Boston in February 2024 to promote their most recent record, their sixth, God Games. It would’ve been sooner, but the original Queens of the Stone Age shows were postponed from the fall due to health reasons after frontman Josh Homme’s unspecified cancer returned. Once the new dates were locked in, Mosshart and Hince decided to add in another handful of their own to hit the secondary markets, at least in theory.
“That’s the short answer, but to be honest, we’ve found that since the world came back to life after the 2020 thing that we don’t like to talk about, the landscape’s been very different,” Hince says. “Before 2020, it was like, ‘Play as many shows as you can. The more shows you play, the more chance you are of coming back with a profit from the tour.’ And now it seems the absolute opposite, and agents telling or advising bands not to tour too much and not to play too many places too close together. So, this was adding as many shows as we could really to this tiny little run.”
The Boston dates will be the first of seven overall with Queens, and after that, it’ll be off to do more headlining shows in Europe for the summer. Everything after that is up in the air, which is the way Florida native Mosshart and the English-born Hince like it. There’s no pressure to do anything right now but get onstage and tear through the sets with an intensity and spirit, the roots of which we dove deeper into during our 617 Q&A (Six Questions; One Recommendation; Seven Somethings).
Along the way, the camaraderie between the two was a sight to behold – think how you might act with your best friends; laughing at just a sideways glance, busting each other’s stones, and having a connection that feels impossible to break. It’s one of the reasons why, approaching the quarter-century mark, The Kills kind of seem like they’ve only just begun.
:: SIX QUESTIONS
Michael Christopher: A bit back when we spoke, it was right after Jamie had been bitten in the face by a dog.
Jamie Hince: Oh yeah. At the Bowery Hotel.
Right, right. And that was a few years after the accident with the car door, where you smashed your hand in it and thought you might not be able to play guitar again.
Hince: And then there was breaking both my heels, shattering both my feet as well – don’t miss that one out. And there are staples in my skull from running into a spear.
When we were talking about this, Alison, you told me how you had a predilection for tripping over things. You had fallen into a mixing board and then into the drums right after it, or something. And I’m wondering, it’s been a while – like nine years. Are the two of you just as accident-prone, or have things tightened up a little bit?
Mosshart: I’m really not that accident-prone. I don’t totally recall that tripping and falling into a mixing desk… or the drum kit. No…
Hince: But I’m pretty much the same. I’ve realized that. I just maybe… [turns to Mosshart] Do you think I’ve convinced myself? I think it’s a positive thing because I like to do things on the spur of the moment, and I just think, “Of course it’s going to be okay. Everything’s going to be…” I’m not cautious like that when it comes to jumping off a wall or slamming my hand into a car door, or running into a spear.
Mosshart: I like the positive.
Hince: But I’m much the same. Yeah. I try. People around me remind me more like, “Woo, careful,” when I’m sort of balancing four cups of burning hot coffee on my laptop and walking up a ladder, people remind me that I’m not the safest person in the world.
So, it’s partially your own doing. It’s not just happening to you.
Hince: It’s entirely my own doing.
Just so you don’t think I was crazy, Alison, your exact quote was, “We are very accident-prone. I fell into a mixing desk the other day and then stood up and proceeded to fall straight into the drum kit. I was like, what the fuck? Every time I took a step; I tripped over something.”
Mosshart: I remember that! That [was] actually a show, and it’s when we had the drummer and I did, and the stage was this big [puts her hands close together] and I just stepped into one thing and then to another thing, to another thing. I was just ricocheting off. But that was during a live performance when there’s lots of excitement and spinning and stuff. General life, as I’m walking down the street, I’m pretty good at it.
***
Something I notice whenever I see you guys live is how much fun you’re having on stage together. Alison’s like this whirling dervish tornado, and Jamie always gets this smile where it almost looks like you’re happily yelling over at Alison…
[Mosshart laughs]
Hince: I shout the way I’m feeling, and I shout instructions. And honestly, sometimes it’s just gibberish, but it’s a release. I’ve always done it. People have always said, “What the hell are you shouting at like a madman?” I like those kind of things, like [German Krautrock outfit] Can, when they first met Damo Suzuki, they said that they picked him to be the vocalist because he was outside, just shouting at the sky. I just sort of liked that vibe of just a little person just trying to sort of shouting at the universe. And that’s me on stage, really. [laughs]
And it looks fun, which might not be the best word. I mean, is it as enjoyable as it looks for both of you to be up there?
Mosshart: I love it. It’s fun. Fun is a weird word…
Hince: I would not use the description “enjoyable,” but it is something that I find it hard to live without. I don’t want people to get the wrong impression that I’m smiling because I’m enjoying myself. I don’t smile that much, really. It’s just a really amazing kind of catharsis when you’re up there and all these strange things come together and there’s a bit of magic. And if you don’t let yourself completely go and be consumed by it, then you’ll start thinking, “How am I doing this?” And then it’ll fall apart. I mean, there’s just the two of us and a drum machine, so it’s kind of like sometimes I do feel like, “Oh my God, just don’t think about how we’re doing it,” otherwise we’ll stop.
Mosshart: There’s joy in the terror. So many nerves and so much adrenaline and so much energy in the room and so much happening, you know? I mean, I think it’s…yeah, maybe “fun,” but way more than that.
You’re coming up on 25 years together. An artist I interviewed some time ago said, “Bands don’t last.” And I would think it’s even more difficult when it’s exclusively a partnership. What has kept The Kills together not only for this long, but also still very vital?
Mosshart: I think it would’ve been a lot harder if there had been four of us.
Hince: Yeah.
Mosshart: Well, we want to do it – that’s the thing. We want to like each other, and we want to do this band, and we want to make art. And in wanting that, we make it work.
Hince: Because the thing is we really wanted this to last and we wanted it to be super important. And you have to bear in mind that it’s not unconditional. We are not blood. We are kind of as close as blood can be now, but it didn’t start like that. We’re friends. There’s no reason for us to be tied together unless there’s an absolute singular desire to be. And we’ve always had it. I mean, without blowing up our own trumpet, I wish someone else would’ve seen this, but we were walking around Portland today and we’re just cracking up laughing. Like, we get along well. We just get along.
Mosshart: We really like hanging out. [laughs]
Hince: We enjoy each other’s company. We’ve got a single goal, and that is this.
***
Does it help that you take a good amount of time between records as well?
Mosshart: I don’t know. Does it have anything to do with us? It’s never really a plan. It’s always circumstantial. The link between records last time had everything to do with COVID, and then sometimes the link between records has to do with a totally different time, which I really loved. And we could tour solidly for three and a half years, and we would just go around the entire world. That seems to be very different now. So, I would always go like, how in the world are people writing records and putting them out and doing the whole record campaign, and they’re literally on a plane every second and doing all this stuff?
Hince: It’s a very different approach. If you are in a hit-making pop band, the demand for turnover is quicker, but also the demand for playing every town in a country is not required. Some of these huge pop bands, they play two nights, two shows in London, and then four shows – key areas – in America. We tour and tour and tour and tour. It was really vital to us to get out on the road. So that’s why takes us so fucking long. What are you going to do about it?
[Mosshart laughs]
Speaking of albums, Jamie, you’ve said God Games was the happiest in terms of an experience you’ve had making a record together. Is that to say that the others were more difficult or…
Hince: Ash & Ice [2016] was horribly difficult, I felt like. Blood Pressures [2011]… I loved Blood Pressures. That was the first time I felt like I could write songs when I was happy, instead of previously, I’d always thought you kind of had to tap into some sort of misery in order to be creative. But we weren’t really that together in that [looks at Mosshart], you were doing Dead Weather. There was a lot of separation. What I was meaning about [God Games] was it seemed like a real kind of happy collaboration where we were often in the same place at the same time, making an album in the same direction.
Mosshart: It just had a wonderful energy to it. Making this record, it went very quickly. We had a really good time doing it. It really felt like making our first record again. I kept thinking, “I haven’t had this feeling making a record.” I mean, all of the records, all of the feelings are great. I’ve loved every process of making every single one, but it was that kind of naive excitement, this sort of thrill that I hadn’t felt since our very first record.
Does it make you look forward to what the next one is going to be? I know that that’s far off and you haven’t started writing the new one or gotten too involved in it…
Hince: I’ve started writing it. I’ve got 300 —
Mosshart [laughing]: Three hundred songs!
Hince: I’ve got 329 voice notes, which is like little riffs, little song ideas – that’s where I start first. But I feel very much that I started my next record. [laughs] I’m saying it like that, “My party,” I dunno where Alison’s at yet.
Mosshart: Right next to you.
Hince: She’s very quick. When she comes up with things, I’m slow.
Mosshart: I have no idea what it’ll be like. I don’t know where we’ll do it. I don’t know how we’ll do it. I don’t know. We will see.
Hince: I feel like, I mean this is not going to be necessarily forever, but right now I’ve been to see a few shows recently and I keep up on new music all the time, and I’m just finding myself a little bit drowned by overproduction in live shows like, lights, lights, flashing lights, sound, sound, volume everywhere. A real kind of Ableton, I dunno if you know what that is? Let’s simplify it and say it’s a kind of software that everybody uses for their live shows,
Mosshart: It triggers everything.
Hince: And I’m so sick to death of seeing this and hearing this and being blinded by this and being overwhelmed aurally by this. I feel like I want to make a really, really kind of organic, simple back-to-basics record.
:: ONE RECOMMENDATION
Mosshart: I just finished a book called Care and Feeding by Lori Woolever. She was Anthony Bourdain’s assistant for, I think, over a decade. And that book is completely incredible. It’s just the story of her life. It’s kind of an autobiography, and it’s about her time in the restaurant industry in New York and her in cooking school and stuff, and all of her experiences. And it’s really, really hardcore. It’s incredibly interesting and entertaining, but also wild. She’s a great writer, and it’s a pretty heavy story. I loved it. Anyway, it’s really worth reading whether you’re into the food world or not. It really has nothing to do with that. It has everything to do with it, but nothing it has to do with this woman and her experience, really.
Hince: I think romance is back. [At this point, Mosshart tries unsuccessfully to stifle laughing out loud.] And I’m really liking this Danish pop act called Smerz, and it’s a song called “You Got Time and I Got Money.” I really like it. It’s not the sort of thing that’s going to bash you over the head and go like, “Oh my God, what is this?” But it’s just sort of beautifully bloomed inside me. This kind of “Soft DIY Romance” is what I’m calling it. It starts off kind of a lo-fi vocal, almost like something that would be on a Bikini Kill record, the vocal, and then everything around it just kind of grows and grows and strings come in, and it’s just the more kind of beautiful and hi-fi the music is, it kind of changes the way you listen to the vocal.
***
:: SEVEN OF SOMETHING
The latest Kills record is called God Games. Give me seven of your favorite games. This could be anything that qualifies as a game: board game, drinking game… it could be a game you play on your cellphone if you do that.
Hince: Well, I mean there’s a game that used to be a massive part of our lives, and it was called Kariki, and it is a dice game. We don’t play that so much anymore because it’s not a popular thing. Whenever you play it with someone, you’ve got to explain the rules so it gets slightly [monotonous]. It becomes a kind of gang thing that when you’re with people that know how to play, is amazing. Cury
Mosshart: Rummikub is my favorite game.
Hince: I won’t even say the word, let alone play the game or learn the rules.
Mosshart [laughing]: So much fun.
Hince: Gin Rummy I’m going for, because it’s a game that I play almost absolutely every week, but almost two or three times a week with my friend. Yeah, there’s this new gang of weird people that are really into playing cards, and we’ll go out to bars and just play cards.
Hince: Can we say Formula One Grand Prix? It’s a game – kind of game.
Mosshart: That’s my ultimate favorite game.
Hince: It’s a race.
Mosshart: It’s a racing game.
Hince: It’s an absolute passion, to be honest.
Mosshart: I like backgammon. Classic game.
Hince: I like the Rizla game. Whatever you call that, everyone has a different name for it [Forehead Detective]. We call it the Rizla game because, you know, cigarette papers. You write someone’s name on it and stick it on your head, and you have to [figure out the name]. That gets played quite a lot.
Mosshart: I like Spelling Bee. Every day I play Spelling Bee.
Hince: Alright. Now I’ve thought, because I do all these…
Mosshart: Wordle and Strands…
Hince: I do all these geography games every day. I do like to sort of test my knowledge of geography. But yeah…
Mosshart: You can take away my backgammon and do that one.
Hince: I don’t like backgammon. It’s such a [pointless] game.
Mosshart: You can change it to this one because it’s pretty amazing.
Hince: I refuse to learn the rules of backgammon.
Mosshart: I’ve just given you a free game. So, explain your geography game [laughs].
Hince: Okay. It’s a geography game, it’s called Worldle. Not Wordle – I know what you’re going to say. Worldle. And you just get the outline of a country, like the silhouette of a country, and you have to guess where it is. So, you just guess the country, and then it’ll say, “No, you are 3000 miles in the wrong direction.” And you have to pinpoint it from there. And I’ve got pretty damn good at it. I normally get it within three.
Mosshart: You’re also very good at guessing flags.
Hince: I’m getting better at flags. Favorite flag? Zambia.
Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever met someone who had a favorite flag that was Zambia.
Hince: Oh my god. Zambia. It’s like, it looks like a sort of Stanley Kubrick set against the green screen. It’s like got an eagle on this black, golden, red sort of plinth thing. And then it’s green in the background, like a green screen. It’s really odd. And the other flag would be the Saudi Arabian flag because it’s the only flag that is, it’s different on both sides of the flag. Do you know what I mean?
Mosshart: Oh, it’s two sides.
Hince: Yeah. But because it’s got, right, every flag has two sides, but most of the time it’s just the reverse. But this is actually different because it’s writing, so on the other side, if they mirrored it, it would be backwards. So, they’ve done it, and it’s the only flag that does that.
QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE + THE KILLS :: Tuesday, June 10 and Wednesday June 11 at MGM Music Hall at Fenway, 2 Lansdowne St. in Boston, MA :: 7:30 p.m., all ages, $56.75 to $181.70 :: Event info :: Advance tickets:Tuesday :: Advance tickets June 11: Wednesday