by LORRAINE CARPENTER

"We’re never, ever satisfied with anything and both of us are moody fuckers," says VV, the American singer for London’s the Kills. "Everything in the whole wide world could be fine and we’d still be depressed as hell."

Keep on Your Mean Side is their debut album, a disc of lo-fi bruised rock akin to Rid of Me-era PJ Harvey (though more grim than livid), with inviting titles like "Fuck the People" and "Gypsy Death & You." But despite this duo’s dark and dank world - and the fact that we’ll never hear a happy Kills record, "unless something really fucking weird happens to us" - the nine-month writing and recording session that gave birth to the album was, um, kinda fun.

"We were probably happier than we’ve ever been," says VV, speaking for her partner in grime, Hotel, "even though we had no money and everyone thought we were just freaks locking ourselves away in bedrooms." As is often the case with blues, bedrooms fed their inspiration, at least more so than their old bands - VV played punk with Florida’s Discount while Hotel made Britrock with Scarfo. On either side of the Atlantic, each reacted against their respective band with secret homemade music. Eventually, the duo met at a party in London and collaborated by mail until VV crossed over.

"Something happened when we started working together, like we sculpted this sound without knowing it," she says. "I couldn’t really play guitar so he had to play like a full band, and playing along with a drum machine became normal. We always had more ideas than ability." Now, with bigger press and wider tours, self-management and spontaneous music-making have become complex, but VV sounds almost optimistic, and why not? She nearly spent the rest of her musical life locked in a bedroom.

"It’s not that we’re not ambitious, but we didn’t plan to be a band. We just hung out and wrote and did artwork and talked about records and recorded all these songs. Then one day we listened to them, and we were a band, and that was brilliant."

WITH SATURDAY LOOKS GOOD TO ME AT LA SALA ROSSA ON SUNDAY, JULY 20, 9PM, $12

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