Four years ago, it wasn't clear which death band would take off: the Killers or the Kills. Brandon Flowers and pals have hit it big, but it's VV and Hotel who have really honed a great sound. New LP "Midnight Boom" is a stunner, run on ramrod-straight rhythms and knifeblade vocals.

The girl, VV, stares out the guy, Hotel. He fires an intense volley of noize into her stomach. She spits back at him, an inch or two from his face, and collapses to the floor. He places the body of his guitar, now rampaging into feedback, on the ground between her knees, and angles the neck over her. She arches her back, hair flailing. The sound surges.

You don't see chemistry like this on a stage every day of the week. The Kills, VV and Hotel, have a special relationship. They met five or six years ago in South London, while VV, name Alison Mosshart, was on tour in Europe with her band at the time, Discount. Hotel, then known as merely Jamie Hince, had just wound up his group Scarfo and was just knocking around a few ideas of his own, solo. Before Alison returned home to Florida, they exchanged numbers. They corresponded, sending each other letters, tapes (of music; of themselves talking) and occasionally splashing out on a pricey international call.

At the turn of the millennium, Alison moved in with Jamie in his flat in Gypsy Hill. They gave each other a stage name, and The Kills were born. In many ways, The Kills had been born the very day when they met. The band was an expression of everything they experienced together, a document of them. They were entirely self-sufficient. Jamie did most of the guitar, Alison did most of the singing, and Jamie learnt to drum and laid down some backing beats on tape. What else did they need? Anyone else would be an intruder.

One summer, they hired a car and drove round the States, calling ahead to clubs in towns they fancied stopping in, and booked themselves to play there. They started recording officially in March 2002, with Liam Watson at Toe Rag. Four tracks, including their cover of 'Dropout Boogie' by Captain Beefheart, were released by Domino as the Black Rooster EP that summer. Early in 2003, the three originals therefrom were added to eight other self-penned songs to make up their first album, Keep On Your Mean Side.

Happily colliding with the new craze for a back to basics aesthetic, the Kills rough-edged, blues-rooted sound got an abnormally unanimous thumbs-up from the UK's press in particular and saw them tour the world with sunglasses unreconstructed after dark.

In 2005 The Kills followed up with their second LP No Wow. Recorded at the legendary Sear Sound in midtown Manhattan (a kind of all-valve transatlantic cousin of Toe Rag) the atmosphere of the city seeped into the grooves of the album. Tracks shiver with the drum machine neurosis that only duos in leather can truly evince; Suicide, Rough Trade Cabaret Voltaire, No Wow seeds the continuum and echoes the lost party soundtrack of mirror ball Manhattan or as Jamie calls it "the low end of Giorgio Moroder". Unsurprisingly, bass-fixated mixers du jour: Tiga, Chicken Lips and Mstrkrft found plenty to rinse among the grooves and turned in some appropriately heavy mixes. The Kills undertook another dose of international touring that finessed their low / rent, high / art rock and roll and drew a smart sharp line through the first phase of the band.

The Kills are currently putting the finishing touches to an all-new LP, out March 2008.