Yesterday (September 4th) legendary producer Kevin Shirley issued the following update:

"Hi, took a couple days off. Good to have a break. (Here is) a picture of kiteboarders at Sunset, at County Line Beach.

Start mixing Kittie tomorrow (September 5th) - let you know what's shakin'.

Thanks, Maiden fans - seems a lot of you are diggin' the album and letting me know. The album is released in the States today, I think, or tomorrow!"

As previously reported, Kittie recently finished recording their fourth album and intends to independently release it in March, 2007 on its own record label, Kiss Of Infamy.

Billboard.com got the first listen to the new material at Retro Sound Studio in Red Bank, NJ, where Kittie recorded the as-yet-untitled album with producer Jack Ponti (ALICE COOPER, DORO).

"I think we really just wanted to show off what we've been doing these past few years for people [who] thought we had dropped off the face of the earth," singer Morgan Lander says of the record. "We've toured a lot, we've become an amazing band, we've become really tight [and] we're a completely different beast than we were."

Lander and her sister, Mercedes (who plays drums), have continued forging ahead with the band since it settled a breach of contract suit with former label Artemis Records and parent Sheridan Square Entertainment in March 2003 and officially left the label in April 2005. This year, they have also put out a digital EP, added new members Tara McLeod (guitar) and Trish Doan (bass), and embarked on a 50-show club tour of the United States.

Red Bank is Ponti's home base; he hadn't worked as a producer since helming Machine To Machine by Doro in 1990, but decided to team with Kittie because of "the girls never getting [the due] they deserved in terms of their musicianship or their abilities, and that it was a somewhat difficult project to tackle, so that made a lot of sense to me, as bizarre as that sounds. I'd rather do things that are difficult than things that are easy."

Under Ponti's tutelage, Kittie's music has a fuller, more developed sound. Among the tracks expected to appear on the album are 'Breath', 'Never Again', 'This 2 Shall Pass' and 'Everything That Could Have Been'.

Morgan Lander says the band is still nailing down details of distribution for Kiss of Infamy.