Kittie vocalist / guitarist Morgan Lander and drummer Mercedes Lander recently spoke with Metal Hammer, looking back on the success of their breakthrough debut album, Spit, from 2000. Following is an exverpt from the story.

With 'Brackish' on constant rotation on music video channels, things escalated quickly and in January 2000, Kittie were booked to support Slipknot on the Iowans’ first headline tour. 

“We left for the tour, and I just never went back to high school,” says Morgan. “Those first 5,000 copies that we thought we were only going to seek for the entirety of our career flew off the shelves in a couple of days when Spit was released and then it started to sink in, the true size of what was to come.”

That July, just a year after being signed, Kittie played the second stage at Ozzfest. Opening for headliners Soulfly, they were the youngest and only female band on the bill. But rapid success also had a downside, and from the outset, the band found themselves exposed to the rampant misogyny of the 00s metal scene, and locked in a constant battle to be taken seriously. Reviews of Spit at the time of its release unanimously refer in astonishment to the fact the band were women. 

On a prominent US chat show a suggestion that they were "Britney Spears meets Slayer" was greeted by stony expressions and palpable annoyance. Meanwhile, during gigs, men would peek behind their amps, so certain they would find a bloke back there actually playing the guitars.

"Being a young person and having that around you really hurts. It sucks," says Morgan. "There were suggestions made (by our label), ‘Maybe you can hire a songwriter to help you’ and we were like, ‘Fuck that.’ We were so defiant looking back, maybe it was detrimental with our relationship with the label. We said no to many things – I’m pretty sure Calvin Klein asked us to do (an advert) and we were like, ‘Fuck you, no way.’ That would have been huge! We were so much in control of our career and direction, we didn’t want anyone to question the validity of our songwriting skills or our abilities as musicians. No one could tell us what to do. We wanted to blaze our own trail and that is baked into 'Brackish' and also the whole album.”

Read the complete story here.

Lander - who now fronts Karkaos - recently guested on Rock Talks and discussed the possibility of Kittie returning with a new album. The band's latest album, I've Failed You, was released in 2011.

Morgan: "We are no longer a signed act, so if we were going to make new music it would be released independently. But we do still have a number of legacy-type projects that we are going to be releasing and working on for the future. We love to be able to pay tribute to the things that we've done in the past, and I know that a lot of people are even just excited for re-releases of old stuff and whatnot. We're always looking for ways to reintroduce people and whatnot, so we do have a couple of things coming down the pipeline. I can't really give too many details yet, but there will be announcements and it will be awesome, and it should be pretty fun. But no new music as of right now."

Lander is featured below in a lockdown cover of the Carcass classic "Buried Dreams" with Jeff Phillips (guitar, bass) and Michael Sage (drums / samples).

The track was mixed and mastered by Doug Fury at Fortissimo Sound. The song is taken from Carcass' 1993 album, Heartwork

The trio previously released a cover of the Prong classic "Snap Your Fingers, Snap Your Neck", which is now available on Spotify.