Kittie seem to have spent most of their career trying to distance themselves from their most successful album. Although they always exhibited more aggressive strands than most of their contemporaries, the band’s 1999 debut, Spit, was firmly positioned in the nu metal sphere. By their second album, Oracle, they had stepped away from that scene entirely, with a more extreme sound and grooves that owed more to Obituary than Korn. They explored new directions and kept the consistency high for the next decade, but interest gradually fizzled out and, when bassist Trish Doan passed away in 2017, it looked like the band would fizzle out too.
Instead, they were swept up in a wave of nostalgia, with high-profile appearances at the When We Were Young and Sick New World festivals thrusting them back into the public eye. “For a long time in the nu metal hangover era, it was a bit of a bad word,” frontwoman Morgan Lander told Hammer. “While I still don’t think we are a nu metal band now, being associated with that genre wasn’t such a bad thing.” With Kittie finally embracing their origins and Spit turning 25 this year, it might seem that the time is right for them to join that still-burgeoning nu metal revival. They certainly give a nod to the past, but this is no turn-of-the-century flashback. Fire dips into every era of the band’s history, while also applying a muscular modern makeover that froths and spits with vitality.
