Returning metal faves Kittie have revealed the unlikely set of circumstances that led to them recording their first album in over a decade - the excellent Fire, which was given an 8/10 score by Metal Hammer's Paul Travers upon release last month.
Speaking in Metal Hammer's latest issue, out now, the band explain that a certain festival offer and a chance encounter with an old friend from the industry sewed the seeds for their official comeback, having been largely inactive following their 2011 album, I've Failed You.
“I remember when the When We Were Young [festival] offer came in to our email, I took a screenshot of it and I sent it to Morgan. I was like, ‘What do you want to do about this?’” recalls drummer Mercedes Lander. “It was a really great offer, something that was almost like, you can’t say no to that. The guy that was offering us the show was very persistent. It’s his fault that we’re doing a record now. But you know what, I’m glad for his persistence, because I don’t think that would’ve ever happened if he hadn’t."
Mercedes' sister and Kittie frontwoman Morgan Lander goes on to reveal that at the festival, the band would bump into Ash Avildsen, founder of Sumerian Records, who had also been their booking agent many years earlier. A few weeks after they reunited with Avildsen, he offered them the chance to record an album.
“He was like, ‘I want you to really think about it. I’d love to put a Kittie album out’,” Morgan says. “He was like, ‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any music yet.’ And we were like, ‘Good, because we don’t!’ This was not on our bingo card. We did not plan this. Everything sort of spiralled from there.”
Read more from Kittie in the new issue of Metal Hammer, starring Ghost on the cover.
