Saint Agnes: This Is Not The End

SLIPKNOT’s IOWA. NINE INCH NAIL’s The Downward Spiral. KORN’s self-titled debut. Grief has given us some of the greatest albums of all time. There’s an otherworldly quality to music made as a response to the unbearable, overwhelming, intense feeling of sorrow that engulfs us. For Kitty A. Austin of SAINT AGNES, grieving the sudden illness and death of her mother gave birth to new album Bloodsuckers.

“Very early on when my mom was sick; she got sick very quickly and died very quickly, it was all very sudden; like the minute things went south with her, I had a very strong instinctive response of having to get some kind of positive out of this awful thing that’s happened,” Kitty admits in the studio, sat side-by-side with partner in crime, producer, guitarist, and bassist Jon James Tufnell.

To listen to Bloodsuckers is to bear witness to an exorcism. It’s a soul cleanse soaked in grunge, industrial, nu-metal, and punk. It wears its heart on its sleeve, because that’s exactly what it is, as Kitty confesses that “making a record seemed like the perfect way to honour the relationship I had and the love I had for my mom, but also as a way of coping. When you’re grieving, those first few months are just crazy, your emotions are all over the place; very low lows and very high highs.”

Whilst Kitty doused herself in gasoline and lit a matchstick, Jon battled with his role in helping piece it all together as an album, reflecting that “there was an element of guilt about whether I should allow myself to be involved in facilitating Kitty to go to these depths.” It was in these moments that Jon’s very understanding of music was torn apart and redesigned.

“The first few NINE INCH NAILS albums, that stuff that’s really intense that I love, when I listen to it, I feel bigger, stronger, better about myself even though it’s so dark. What I don’t think I’d anticipated is that when you’re actually involved in making that art, it’s not the same. When someone is digging really deep and performing, the end result is Kitty on the floor crying and it was ugly and sad and heart wrenching, and didn’t have a sense of air-punching victory, it was just ugly, and there’s part of you that doesn’t want to be doing it.”

Pushing through the pain, with the complete creative freedom that producing the album themselves offers, allowed SAINT AGNES to build Bloodsuckers into a whole new beast. But with great power comes great responsibility, like having to hand these songs over to the world and how that feels.

“It’s been quite hard to play them live, it’s just so emotional. I’m not used to going on stage and baring my soul,” says Kitty, before reflecting that they’re all the better as a band for it, that “the way I feel about performing has changed a lot since making this record. Whereas before, like all of us felt this angsty us against the world attitude when we’re playing live. We’ve still got a lot of aggression when we play, but there’s this joyous underpinning of everything because people in the audience know what the songs are about, they can tell it’s emotional for me to sing.”

Emotion underpins everything about Bloodsuckers. Whether it’s the raging fire that burns inside of industrial-rager Animal, the scab-picking self-loathing grunge that grinds At War With Myself’s gears, or the us against the world euphoria of big-room banger Outsider. But at its heart, central to its entire being, is This Is Not The End. Warped vocals, distorted guitars, and a piano line that’ll pick away at your heart. Explicitly about her mother’s death, it took time for Kitty to purge it out.

“I really wanted to write a song about what happened, but I just couldn’t bring myself to open myself up as much as I needed to, to write something that honest, because your emotions are so raw, it’s just hard to get into the right headspace,” she explains, sorrow in her voice, but a sly sense of survival at having got the song done, thanks to Jon.

“I wrote the piano part about three years ago, and just sang a melody,” he explains. Kitty adds, “we listened to it and I was like ‘this is perfect, let me have it’ and I went off into a different room and put headphones in and listened to it again and again and again, and the words just came.”

Whilst the words wrote themselves on a page easy enough, bringing them to life wasn’t as smooth. Kitty recorded her vocals alone, only twice, as “it was the hardest one to do” and “couldn’t sing it again”. But when Jon went to piece this puzzle together, the audio had glitched, like a ghost in the machine. Alone in the studio, he built it up with the warped vocals, and played it to Kitty the next day.

“It really suits the song, it suits the lyrics, this weird, otherworldly digital glitching on the vocal is perfect; it couldn’t be more what I envisioned,” Kitty beams, as Jon says, “it feels like a corroding file, a corrupted disk; if we hadn’t had that sound, we’d have spent ages trying to get something similar to that afterwards, but as it was it was just a happy accident.”

“Your natural reaction when you’re singing a ballad, you assume people want to hear a beautiful, perfect, detailed vocal with every nuance in there, but actually, there’s something beautiful about the imperfections.”

Bloodsuckers isn’t just SAINT AGNES wallowing in sadness. It’s a rebirth, a phoenix rising from the ashes of grief. It’s an album that empowers you to take back your life, and live it. I Mean Nothing To You says it best: “There’s a hole in my head, your voice fills it up with dread, but today I’m gonna get out of bed, come round, fuck your shit up instead”. And for Kitty and Jon, it’s what makes them.

“I think both of us have always felt like outsiders our whole lives, always looking for home I guess, and a big part of that is being someone who’s been crushed by various things; all of our music seems to have that empowering feel to it when it comes out of us, that’s the goal. I’m trying to empower myself,” says Kitty, as Jon bounces off her thoughts. “There’s a metaphorical little kid in all of our music, it’s us, it’s this nervous, insecure kid that is vulnerable; that’s our most vulnerable self in there that we want to look after and give advice to, and if you picture that kid suddenly being given a tool or a weapon that makes them feel 10 feet tall, that’s what the music does for us.”

In the end, that little kid inside of them extends to their fans too. They write songs for specific fans – “there’s specific people I’ll think of when I’m writing something like that, thinking they’re gonna fucking love this live” – and feel it’s “us and them, we wouldn’t exist without them.”

Being a beacon for the world’s outsiders to gather round has become their mission, and their more than happy to accept. As Jon says it best, SAINT AGNES are a gang, and there’s nothing better than that.

“There is an exciting glory in suddenly feeling like I’m not on my own, I’m part of a gang, and we’re doing something that matters to us, and there’s people who it matters to them, and our gang gets bigger, and there’s something really empowering about that, and that does infuse the music.”

Bloodsuckers is out now via Spinefarm Records.

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