Listen: The Kills Calm Down A Bit on 'Blood Pressures'

Photograph by Shawn Brackbill

Click to listen to The Kills' Blood Pressures

The Kills have always emphasized tension in their music – sexual tension between its two members Alison Mosshart and Jamie Hince, certainly, but also a nervous tension that made all their songs sound wired and bug-eyed. Their fourth album, Blood Pressures, finds the duo dialing down that manic energy a bit, or at least enough to allow for a stoned, quasi-reggae groove on "Satellite" and spare, gentle ballads like "Last Goodbye" and "Wild Charms." Even still, the band deliver a few dirty, digitally distorted blues rockers like "DNA" and "Nail In My Coffin" to keep things from getting too far away from what they do best.

Rob Sheffield Reviews Blood Pressures

Blood Pressures will hit stores on April 5th – you can pre-order it from iTunes – but you can stream it in its entirety now.

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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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