Kittie spent a lot of years trying to avoid a moment quite like this one. As a band of teenagers hitting the club scene at the beginning of the new millennium, the four-piece exploded out of London, Ontario, with metal that was raw and raging, while dodging excruciating puns about cats and kittens and their furry brethren. But the truth was, these young rockers in spiked collars and studded loved the little felines as much as anyone.
So now here they are, grown women back to lead a new chapter of the reunited Kittie, gathered inside a Los Angeles cat café and posing for pictures with a litter of laidback kitties. Right now, singer and guitarist Morgan Lander, clad in black leather and tights, piercings and copper-red hair, is cradling a tuxedo-coloured cat in her arms.
“All the cat puns finally died down and we’re like, ‘Alright, now’s our moment! We’re gonna do a photoshoot with cats!’” she says with a laugh, already imagining the headlines. “Something like, ‘Kittie Scratch Their Way Back!’”
As she poses with the cat, her younger sister, drummer Mercedes, stands behind the photographer and waves a sparkly toy to help inspire a reaction from the beast on-camera. Also here is guitarist Tara McLeod, taking in all the feline décor. Taped to one wall are Polaroid pictures of recent adoptees held by their new human owners. On another is a glowing neon light spelling out the words ‘You’ve got to be kitten me.’ Bassist Ivana ‘Ivy’ Jenkins is home in Michigan with family obligations.
The cat café is located between a waxing/spray-tan boutique and an insurance office on stylish Melrose Avenue, and is just one stop for Kittie in a whirlwind two-day trip to LA. They are here doing interviews and pictures, and hosting a launch party at the famous Rainbow Bar and Grill on the Sunset Strip to celebrate the coming release of a new album, Fire, before returning to Canada.
The three bandmembers are soon posing shoulder-to-shoulder on a bench covered by a fuzzy white blanket, each holding a cat as the camera snaps away. Then Mercedes gasps, and releases her cat to the floor. “Oh no,” she announces. “I’ve got poop on me!”
Fire is Kittie’s first album of new material since 2011, and its arrival in 2024 is a surprise not only to their fans, but to the bandmembers themselves after a long period of inaction. The title song kicks off the album with a muscular blast of fury and finesse, churning riffs and slamming beats, as Morgan’s layered vocals go from ominous whisper to a scream. The sound is catchy and aggro, and arrives just in time for the current nu metal resurrection.
Kittie were junior partners in that movement, an adolescent all-female unit following a path first charted by the likes of Korn, System Of A Down and Limp Bizkit. Kittie sang songs of real teen rage that quickly connected with their peers in the audience.
“There is something very primal and visceral about the music we made when we first came out,” says Morgan. “Our very first songs were reflections of the feelings we were having, the emotions and teenage angst that was coming out of us at that time.” Only three years after they began, things started happening for Kittie, who managed something more than simply recreating the sounds of their idols. “We had no idea the lasting impact being in this band would have,” says Morgan. “When you’re young, you don’t think that far in the future. Everything felt very in the moment.”
There was no context for what they were doing, with only a few examples of earlier generations of female hard rockers to look to, from The Runaways to L7. And if they hadn’t fully experienced misogyny in their teenage lives back home, on the road it was a daily challenge.
"The whole time, of course," says Mercedes. "And if it wasn't the other bands that we were touring with, it was people in the industry – journalists especially.” She remembers the band once kicking a female reporter from a national magazine off their tour bus after she asked if they were still virgins. “One thing that we were really good at was telling people to fuck off. I actually wish we did it more.”
For Kittie’s next chapter, new songs were sketched out online among the now-scattered bandmembers, then worked out at Mercedes’ 150-year-old farmhouse about 45 minutes outside of London, Ontario, with amps and drums crowded around her fireplace. With no neighbours close enough to be affected, Kittie could play loud, their only audience the drummer’s many cats. “They’re all deaf, so it’s all right,” explains Tara. “They scatter. Mercedes hits very hard.”
For the album, Kittie worked with producer Nick Raskulinecz, a proven force in the studio with a long history of working with many hugely influential artists – Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, Mastodon, Deftones, Korn and Code Orange among them. He heard Kittie’s demos and immediately wanted to work with them, and created what Mercedes describes as “a modern take on an old-school production”. That meant capturing the band as they sounded live, with real drums, not programmed beats.
They recorded in Nashville at a studio on Music Row, and then at the producer’s home studio, where Nick acted both as fan and enthusiastic coach. “We were tracking and he’s playing air-guitar the whole time, headbanging. He’s like a big kid,” says Morgan. “He was very invested in the music and in the band in general, just being like, ‘I want to see you girls win!’ – which is really nice to hear.”
The result is an album of heavy, raging tunes, offering Kittie as not only a mature force, but arguably stronger than ever. The first song released as a single was Eyes Wide Open, delivered with a music video of the band performing amid deep vampiric shades of red and black. A deeper cut is Falter, a song Morgan wrote about human bungling and the coming end of the world. On the song Vultures, things get more personal, touching on Kittie’s earlier struggles.
“I don’t sing about love,” Morgan insists. “That’s just not what Kittieis, you know I would never bear my soul in that way in a song.” But, she adds, Vultures does include “some relationship history in there, and [music] industry kind of yuckiness”.
Kittie had been through a lot to get here. And having another chance at a career wasn’t something they thought much about. “Everybody grows up. The industry is a harsh place. Young people come together and fall apart and are no longer friends,” Morgan recounts. “Those are real-life growing pains and those happened while we were in the public eye.”
By the middle of 2012, Kittie’s time as an active recording and touring act came to a premature end, following a grinding period of fatigue and disappointment. Most of them were still in their 20s, but Kittie saw only diminished returns ahead as the band played to shrinking crowds on a final, 46-date spring tour with Blackguard and The Agonist.
"Some of those shows were a little defeating," says Morgan, who now remembers a couple of those last tours as travelling in a van and drinking too much Crown Royal. “When you’re playing to, like, 50 people – sometimes more, sometimes less – it was just like, ‘Ugh.’ It was tiring. And it’s not like we sat down and had a conversation of, ‘Alright guys, this is it. We’re breaking the band up.’ It was just a natural organic, ‘Let’s come home and just take a step back.’”
Kittie went on an unannounced hiatus, as bandmembers scattered to other projects and, in the case of Morgan and Mercedes, normal jobs for the first time in their lives. Back home in London, Ontario, the Lander sisters ultimately found careers at a local software company. It was an adjustment.
“It took a long time to adjust to not being a weirdo musician,” Mercedes says with a laugh. “I work with engineers. When we’re all sitting around at a work function and everybody’s throwing around their own stories, I am like, ‘Wow, I have so many stories that are absolutely fucked’, and everybody would be like, ‘You’re crazy! What are you talking about?!’ There’s a lot of instances where – and we call them ‘normies’ – normal people don’t really understand what it’s like [in rock]. I know I’m not normal.”
There were occasional signs of life in Kittie, including a one-off show in Toronto in 2013. The band also maintained a presence on social media and successfully raised funds for a documentary, Kittie: Origins/Evolutions, accompanied by a 2017 reunion concert at London Music Hall with virtually every line-up of the group (notably and obviously minus bassist Trish Doan, who had tragically passed away earlier that year), all to celebrate their 20th anniversary. There were no plans for Kittie beyond that.
Then, in 2021, Kittie received an email from Live Nation offering a gig playing the following year’s When We Were Young Festival in Las Vegas, sharing a bill with a massive line-up that ranged from My Chemical Romance to Knocked Loose, Black Veil Brides to Poppy.
“I remember when the When We Were Young 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 Mercedes. Her sister wasn’t sure, but the rep at Live Nation didn’t wait long before sending the offer again.
“It was a really great offer, something that was almost like, you can’t say no to that,” Mercedes adds. “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.”
Other offers soon followed, including another major Vegas festival in 2023, Sick New World, headlined by System Of A Down, Korn and Deftones. After a decade of very little activity as a band, and with no signs of a real comeback ahead, Kittie were suddenly in demand again. One major factor was a nu metal revival that caught the band – and many others – by surprise, reintroducing them not just to original fans but also teens drawn into nu metal and putting Kittie songs on TikTok.
At When We Were Young, Mercedes ran into Ash Avildsen, founder of Sumerian Records, who had also been their booking agent many years earlier. A few weeks after the festival, he offered them a record deal.
“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.”
Kittie got to work, and at Sick New World they were able to debut Vultures live as their first new song offering in 12 years. In that time, some things had changed, at least a bit.
“There is a lot more representation of women in metal,” Morgan says. “We were sort of the lone women in modern metal or nu metal for a really long time. While I don’t think that has solved all of the problems of misogyny and all of those things most women in the music industry experience, representation certainly helps. It’s a slow crawl to that equality thing, but there’s a lot of incredible female talent out there, and I love to be a part of it.”
On their last night in Los Angeles, the women of Kittie are having a party. They were still teens when they first came to the Rainbow, and can remember their first times seeing Lemmy and David Lee Roth at the bar, grappling with the arcade machine. Tonight they’re upstairs to give a crowd of invited guests an early preview of Fire, now blasting out of the PA, while friends and followers dine on pizza and the band’s new non-alcoholic beer, KittiePIG, brewed in Calgary.
“It’s sort of like a coming-out party, isn’t it? It’s a way for us to be like, ‘Hey, we’re back’ in real time, and see people’s faces as they’re reacting to the songs,” says Morgan.
Among the guests tonight is Fear Factory guitarist Dino Cazares. Fear Factory’s new singer, Milo Silvestro, is also here. Back in 2001, Kittie and Fear Factory toured together, and Dino always showed the teenage band real respect.
“Dino and I hit it off – and so did the rest of the band,” recalls Mercedes of Kittie during that tour. “I really liked Dino and I really liked their old singer Burton. The other guys, uh, they weren’t so great, but...”
Mercedes does not elaborate, and she maybe doesn’t need to. That was 23 years ago, and things were different then. Kittie were still kids new to the road, and not every player they met along the way was a gentleman. They survived dramatic highs and lows to get here.
“Maybe we’re still a little scarred from all the things that have happened in the past, but it feels like a second chance and a new opportunity,” says Morgan with a smile, as the party winds down. “And if that’s the kind of positivity that we’re dealing with, then like, we’re unstoppable.”
Fire is out now via Sumerian. Order your exclusive Kittie t-shirt and Metal Hammer cover via the official Metal Hammer store
