In the early days of The Kills, it would’ve been difficult to envisage them going a full five years without putting a record out. There was always a palpable intensity to the relationship between Jamie Hince and Alison Mosshart, enough to have even the most resolute of cynics think twice about whether or not everything’s supposed to happen for a reason. After all, it seems like some coincidence that these two people - born thousands of miles and the best part of a decade apart - should end up meeting by chance fifteen years ago, when an old band of Mosshart’s happened to be staying in the flat beneath Hince’s.

The pair share a practically telepathic understanding that seems to transcend just music; image and aesthetic are almost as crucial a part of their artistic expression. Their first three records – Keep On Your Mean Side, No Wow and Midnight Boom – swung between filthy garage punk to disarming intimacy in cavalier fashion, and their live shows, which only ever featured the two of them and a drum machine - were exercises in simmering tension. You always got the impression that the thing that made this particular creative relationship tick was intangible, and certainly mysterious to the outside world. The Kills seemed like the smallest gang in the world, and for the only two people lucky enough to count themselves among the membership, the band was their lives.

By 2011’s Blood Pressures, though, things were changing - personally and professionally. Actually, that’s kind of the point – that divide had never existed before. For Mosshart and Hince, The Kills was an all-encompassing affair, with the duo living in each other’s pockets for years and sharing a dedication to determinedly lo-fi indie rock that never looked especially flexible. Blood Pressures marked a turning point; suddenly, the sound was more expansive, incorporating cinematic balladry (‘The Last Goodbye’) and grungy soul (‘DNA’). Onstage, the bubble that the band had always operated in burst to accommodate more players for the first time - drummers and backing singers, specifically. Hince got married and geared up for domesticity; Mosshart, meanwhile, fronted The Dead Weather, making three records with Dean Fertita, Jack Lawrence, and Jack White in a band that always sounded like less than the sum of its parts.

The Kills still toured extensively – more so than ever before, in fact – but once Blood Pressures had been put to bed, radio silence ensued, only occasionally punctured by the occasional crackle of live dates. Little information on new music was forthcoming; refreshingly, this is not the sort of band to exhaustively post studio updates to social media. Towards the end of last year, The Dead Weather’s decision not to tour their latest album, Dodge And Burn, owing to the individual members’ other commitments looked promising, but by February, The Kills were coming up on half a decade without a new LP – an uncharacteristically barren stretch, given that they released their first three albums within the same time frame.

Better late than never, though, especially given that the last few years of turbulence has actually helped to shape what is, by a distance, the most adventurous Kills record to date. Ash & Ice’s very existence might have been in doubt when Hince injured his left hand and was forced to undergo six surgeries; having lost the use of one of his fingers, he had to teach himself how to play guitar all over again, and inevitably began to gravitate towards other ways of writing. There’s plenty of the bluesy swagger of old, but there’s also a clever nod on dancehall on ‘Let It Drop’ and moody minimalism on ‘Days Of Why And How’; Mosshart, meanwhile, continues to veer compellingly between arrogance and vulnerability. Fresh from previewing the album at a handful of tiny European dates, Hince ran us through the protracted gestation that made Ash & Ice into The Kills’ sharpest statement yet.

DiS: How hard do you have to slam your finger in a car door to end up needing surgery six times?

Jamie Hince: It was more to do with a series of mishaps after it happened. I used to have trigger finger, which kind of locked my fingers up when I’d been playing a lot, so I had a hand specialist, who would inject my knuckles with cortisone – which in itself is really, really painful. It was the end of the middle finger on my left hand that I crushed in the door, and when I went to my hand guy with it, I think he was a bit gung-ho. He injected me with cortisone again, and I just merrily went off to Marrakesh for a week. I barely slept the whole time I was there; I was just in this excruciating pain, and my finger started turning deep purple. There was obviously something really wrong, and when I got back to London, they kind of panicked and put me straight into surgery.

I’d gotten this deep bone infection, and it kind of rotted my hand, really. I lost my tendon from the tip of the finger up to my wrist. The thing is, once you lose it, you’re fucked; you have to have a transplant, and that means undergoing a few different surgeries to prepare the hand to accept another tendon. I’ve got about ten percent movement in it, now. I don’t play guitar with it – it just hangs there.

Did you ever worry about how badly it was going to affect your playing in the long term - or whether you might be finished as a guitarist?

That didn’t happen until a lot later, actually. That sort of panic didn’t really set in for quite a while. I discovered that I’m really positive to the point of naïveté, and it didn’t cross my mind that I’d lose the finger or not be able to play guitar any more. I just jumped straight into trying to write without it, so I was writing songs for this record without it in between surgeries, and getting a style together that didn’t involve that finger. The thing is, I always thought that I’d be able to use it again eventually, and then it sort of dawned on me about a year later; I was explaining this to the doctors, and I could see it in their faces: “You ain’t getting it back, mate!” And that was the point at which I thought: “Fuck! Maybe I’m not gonna be a guitar player anymore.”

So I put all my effort into starting a studio up, and writing from that point of view. I didn’t ever really sit back and cry about it. There’s plenty of options, you know? The lucky thing is that I started this band with the idea that I wanted to be The Stooges on stage, and Massive Attack in the studio. I just sort of shifted the focus towards the second thing to begin with, and I’ve gradually re-learned to play without the finger since.

How frustrating was it to have to work in fits and starts to accommodate the recovery time from the surgeries? Did you ever feel as if the record was never going to be finished?

I mean, part of the decision we made when we signed with Domino was that we knew they were never going to be a label who’d be demanding this and that, and they were very good with us; it was just: “Get it right, make sure your health comes first.” You’ve got to be realistic, though - there’s financial deadlines, and we were running out of money. You can’t go too long without earning, so there were some panicky meetings with our bank, and that was when we were: “Right, we’ve gotta get this shit together.” That’s the worst kind of pressure, really, when it comes down to money.

What exactly were you up to in the studio when you couldn’t pick up the guitar?

I started getting into programming a lot more. I’ve always loved that, because I can sit and make loops and rhythms forever, so I really threw myself into that - plus, writing things on keyboard, that kind of thing. I spent a lot more time listening, and thinking, and that’s become such an important part of writing for me now. If I’d done what I usually do, just dived in and written guitar riffs non-stop, the record wouldn’t have turned out like this. That made me think about how guitar music is still so retro and referential; it’s stuck somewhere between the seventies and the nineties, you know? So I suppose I was thinking about how I could make my own band sound a bit more adventurous in its approach to the guitar, a bit more forward-thinking. It’s exciting to see that hip hop and dancehall and electronic music are constantly evolving and going through these revolutions, and guitar music somehow doesn’t. It’s like a fucking museum.

You were talking recently about how much you love the new Rihanna record...

Yeah, absolutely, and I should say that it’s not that thing of guitar bands ironically claiming to like Britney Spears, or some shit. I was trying to be clear, when I brought up Rihanna, that there was no fucking irony to it. That album’s gone in a phenomenally different direction to anything she’s made before, and it’s the first thing I’ve heard in a while that’s really gotten my blood pumping. I think it’s astonishing, that record.

It’s gone over as well as anything else she’s done, too. She’s still all over the top ten, still playing stadiums. It definitely hasn’t hurt her commercially.

Yeah, her audience seem to have really embraced it.

Kendrick Lamar’s another good example – he’s making really rich and challenging records, and he’s massive. It blows my mind that he can put out a compilation of really diverse demos, present it really awkwardly, and have it go straight to number one in the States.

Definitely. I think one of the reasons for that is that the audience for hip hop have almost wanted for it to go a bit weird and psychedelic and experimental. They’ve encouraged that, because they want to hear something groundbreaking. For too long, it’s made your body move, but some of the shit you have to listen to whilst you’re dancing to it just doesn’t fucking speak to you at all. Now it does, and the audiences seem really into it. I don’t know why it is, but with electric guitar music, the people listening to it just don’t expect it to be experimental or different, you know? Mass audiences don’t, at least. I’m not sure why. It’s maybe something to do with the fact that experimental guitar bands tend to do their experimenting in the same fucking tiny little area of ambience and slow-paced misery.

Speaking of slow-paced misery, you didn’t go back to the same little small town in the middle of nowhere to make this record.

Yeah, we made it in Los Angeles instead. The last three albums were all done in the same studio, Key Club in Benton Harbor, Michigan, and the point of it was to lock ourselves away. There’s no distractions in that town. There’s nothing to do. The only nightlife is the 24-hour supermarket. The mentality was very much just to lock the doors and punish ourselves into creating things, almost to the point of it affecting our health, but it worked: we rationalised it as: “Well, we’re getting all this stuff done, and it’s exciting to be making a record in secret and then wheeling it out to the world.” This time, it just felt like the right time to do something different, maybe because I was so imprisoned with this fucking hand. There was so much time spent shut away that I was ready to meet the world again a little bit.

Why Los Angeles?

We wanted to make a record that embraced some of the noise and the chaos of the city, because that’s kind of how we live our lives anyway! LA was a good fit for that; it was about inviting opportunity, really. You don’t know how your day’s going to go, or who you’re going to run into. It changes the way you think. I just felt that if we wanted to make an album that wasn’t steeped in some kind of very cryptic rock & roll imagery, because I tried to keep away from that on my lyrics for this record, that we’d sort of have to live amongst the reality of a city. Finding something new and exciting can be as simple as just doing the opposite of what you normally do.

I’m really surprised at how far removed a lot of your influences seem to be from what people might expect. Alison, too; I remember her sitting in for Jarvis Cocker on 6 Music a few years back, and playing stuff like Hank Williams and Townes Van Zandt, when I was expecting it to be all Captain Beefheart and Royal Trux.

Yeah, and she’s always been consistent in that. The things she references have been there since day one – Neil Young, Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, that kind of thing. I’m the opposite, really; I’ve got this overexcited lack of concentration when it comes to inspiration, and it’s constantly changing from record to record, or even month to month. I’ll hear something I like and think: “Actually, this is how our next album should sound!”

How difficult is it to bridge those stylistic gaps between the things that inspire you and the way that you work as individuals?

It was really frustrating for me at the start of this record. When we sat down and played the songs we’d been writing early on, I was like: “Why aren’t you writing like I’m writing?” It’s sort of my job to find a way of blending the two opposite approaches into one thing, and make it The Kills, and eventually I realised that it’s a good thing, because it stops me from running off in whirlwind of different directions and tangents. Instead, there’s a lot of trial and error. I tend to stumble across things. I always feel like I can’t just sit down and make a snapshot of my life, or where I’m at, and I’ve never been of that frame of mind where a song’s good enough just because I’ve written it. My big fear’s always been not being good enough, and writing stuff that’s ordinary, so I’m always rewriting and rewriting and getting frustrated and screwing it up, just in pursuit of that thing that I listen back to and go; “Whoa! I can’t even recognise myself in that – it’s like I’m operating above my ability.” It takes a long time, and I know that’s grating to Alison, because she works in the opposite way.

I noticed that Alison’s living in Nashville now, and that you’re still in London. In the early days of the band, it always seemed as if you were living in each other’s pockets, even when you weren’t on the road or in the studio. As you’ve gotten older, did it seem healthier to give yourselves a bit of breathing space?

It’s partly that, and it’s partly just that it was inevitable. I got married, and things change. There was an obvious sort of separation when I did that. I think Alison moving back to the States was more about her finding her roots again, really. It became obvious that she’d only ever moved to England for me, so when it got to the point where I had my own life to be getting on with, she wanted to go back over there. There’s no weird animosity about it, or anything; I think we’re both aware that that’s just life, and that you have to adapt to those things if you want to keep your band going. And, honestly, it’s never felt as if we haven’t been hanging out, you know? Even when we were four thousand miles apart, we were constantly communicating over Skype or the phone or whatever, especially about music, and there’d never be more than a month or two when I wouldn’t see her.

It’s interesting that as the relationship between the two of you has gradually changed over the past few years, you’ve begun to bring more people onto the stage with you. Once upon a time, the shows were so intimate that it was impossible to imagine it wouldn’t just be yourself, Alison, and a drum machine, and now there’s backing singers and guys playing floor toms and all sorts.

Yeah. I was actually just looking back at old footage of us playing at the Olympia in Paris, and it’s just two people on stage with their microphones about two feet apart, and there’s something I really love about that. It’s just that I’m also aware that the more you do the thing you love, the higher the risk is that you’re going to run out of love for it. We had that reaction from people for years, that thing of: “You need a drummer!”, and now that we’ve brought more people in, there’s others who’ll say; “Oh, it’s not the same as when it was just the two of them.” I can’t help but think that it’s necessary to change, and to make the change to something that’s brilliant and new.

I felt like we’d be giving in if we got just the one drummer, so I thought we’d have four instead! Plus, you know, the other thing was that we were playing bigger stages regularly for the first time, especially at festivals, where it’d be a massive stage and often, it’d be in the daytime, too. In places like that, you need a bit more of a visual dynamic, I think. It’s given things more of a human vibe, as well; for a long time, Alison and I were in that mindset of the band being a bit of a gang that nobody else was invited to. Which was pretty elitist!

How’s your relationship with the road now? Even while you were recording and with everything that happened to your hand, you’ve still played sporadically since the Blood Pressures tour finished.

It can seem a little bit daunting when you’re at this point, for me at least, because the record’s just coming out and you know you’re going to be out there for the foreseeable. I mean, it’s still absolutely Alison’s domain; it’s what she lives for. She’s the lead singer, and performance is part of her creativity – it all comes together for her on stage. I’ve become much more aware that the thing that really fulfills me, that makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand up, is being in the studio and making new things. That’s when I feel like the band’s moving forward, when I’m in there tinkering away. There’s a sense that when we’re on tour now, we’re standing still. It’s great for six months, eight months, even a year, but eighteen months and longer, you start losing touch with the world – metaphorically and literally. I’ve literally lost a lot of friends and people close to me from being on the road, so there is maybe a little bit of a subconscious sense of apprehension about it at the start, that sort of lives in your blood.

Have you thought about how you’re going to deal with that this time around?

I think we’re aware now that we need a period of touring, then a period of writing, and then a period of recording. Those things don’t ever seem to work very successfully all at the same time. Even when we do write on the road, those songs never make the next fucking record! We toured for two and a half years behind Blood Pressures, and it feels like it takes so much energy to sort of work your way back again once you’re burnt out. It’s punishing getting into the studio and thinking; “What if this doesn’t fucking work?”, when you know it’s already been two or three years since you released an album. That’s the thing; if you’re touring for two years, the obvious conclusion is that the next album’s gonna take a fucking long time, and that - that’s what I can’t let happen again.

Ash & Ice is available now via Domino, and you can read the DiS review of the record here. The Kills tour the UK from September 29th; tickets and information can be found here