Mosshart Doesn’t Ask

The Kills are one of those bands I come back to when everything else sounds like it’s trying too hard. Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince stripped the blues down to something skeletal and mean—two people, minimal gear, maximum attitude—and Baby Says, off their 2011 record Blood Pressures, is that aesthetic at its most concentrated.

The song runs on a single riff that sounds like it can barely be bothered to show up. Mosshart’s vocal sits somewhere between bored and furious, which is exactly where The Kills always live. There’s a menace to the way she delivers it that makes the title’s baby-talk sweetness land like a threat. You don’t argue with whoever is in that room.

Blood Pressures came out after a long gap—Hince had broken his hand, Mosshart had been swallowed by the Dead Weather for what felt like years. The record sounds like two people who’ve done other things since they last spoke and decided none of it mattered as much as this did.

I first got into The Kills through Keep On Your Mean Side, which has the same quality—music that sounds like it was made in a room too small for it, by people indifferent to whether anyone heard it. That indifference, performed or genuine, is most of the point. Baby Says is them at that frequency. Two and a half minutes and then it’s gone, and you play it again.