By Greg Maki
And the 2024 award for comeback album I didn’t know I needed goes to …
It seems to have taken the burst of activity that started with the Canadian quartet’s reunion performance at the 2022 Blue Ridge Rock Festival for Kittie to get its due as a pioneering, influential force in heavy music. (For those who weren’t there at the time, females in metal bands were a rarity when Kittie emerged in the late ‘90s amid what was, at times, an incredibly misogynistic nu-metal scene.) With “Fire,” its seventh album and first since 2011, Kittie has seized the moment, delivering a razor sharp modern metal record.
While nu metal has seen a resurgence in recent years—and you can hear remnants of it in this album’s downtuned guitars—Kittie clearly hasn’t returned to ride the nostalgia wave. Anchored as always by sisters Morgan (vocals/guitar) and Mercedes (drums) Lander, the band incorporates far more influence from groove, thrash and death metal, along with dashes of a more accessible hard rock sound, across the record’s 10 tracks. Morgan, in particular, stands out with a dynamic vocal performance, switching from harsh to clean with ease and the band losing none of its metallic bite even on the almost exclusively melodic “One Foot in the Grave”—a song that easily could be in heavy rotation on both Liquid Metal and Octane. At the other end of the spectrum, the closing “Eyes Wide Open” is the biggest banger of the bunch, sending the album out with a thunderous exclamation point.
The other eight tracks—with “Vultures,” “We Are Shadows” and “Wound” among the highlights—fall somewhere between those two extremes in terms of heaviness and aggression, and the band—which also includes guitarist Tara McLeod and bassist Ivy Vujic—attacks them with authority. The songs refuse to sit in one specific formula, and there isn’t a single wasted second across the album, which runs a lean 35 minutes and was produced by Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains, Ghost, Mastodon). Twenty-five years after breaking down doors with its debut album, “Spit,” Kittie has crafted its most compelling musical statement to date.
Rating: 9/10
Sumerian Records – June 21, 2024
LINKS:
Buy “Fire.”
www.kittie.net
www.facebook.com/kittiepage
www.instagram.com/officialkittie
www.twitter.com/officialkittie
www.youtube.com/kittiechannel
www.tiktok.com/@offficialkittie
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