SAINT AGNES
The new album from rising stars Saint Agnes is an all-out sonic attack – created by two guitarists with an unorthodox approach to tone
There are some occasions in life when doing the wrong thing can be exactly the right thing to do, and making a rock record is one of them. The art of engineering and producing is something that can be taught in a classroom, but learning when to bend the rules, when to break them, and when to throw orthodoxy on the bonfire comes from instinct. It comes from knowing the material.
The songs that Saint Agnes’ vocalist/guitarist Kitty A. Austen and guitarist Jon James Tufnell had put together for Bloodsuckers, their major label debut for Spinefarm and follow-up to 2019 debut Welcome ToSilvertown,told them all they needed to know. This was a record made during difficult times. Kitty’s mother had died in the months before they went to work. This was never going to be finessed onto the tape, quantised, manicured. It was to be a bonfire of the rulebook, ugly and confrontational, and they knew this from the get-go.
“We’re producing even before the song is written,” Kitty says “I’ll have a concept in mind, a vision of the song, and that will include things like, ‘I want a guitar that sounds like this band, or this bit in a specific song.’ We never, ever sit down with an acoustic guitar and work out chords and melody. It is always the whole thing, complete in my head as we go.”
What Saint Agnes had in mind was raw nerves, feedback, nasty fuzz, chaos. When the pair speak to TG, Jon doesn’t need to be wearing a Nine Inch Nails t-shirt to reveal the Trent Reznor influence. You could add Rage Against The Machine in there, too, for the off-road guitar sounds and quiet/loud dynamic.
Bloodsuckers is every inch the studio record but has a live feel, leaning hard on drummer Andy Head’s ability to come down hard with big, clean hits. “You can really crank the overheads and get the excitement from the snare,” Jon says.
You could also run another track of drums and put it through a ZVex Fuzz Factory as Jon did to add some weird textures to Animal. There are moments when you are not quite sure if Kitty is even going to make it to the next track, that any moment now she’s gonna smash the mic and storm off – she has an affection for the word ‘motherf*cker’ to rival Samuel L. Jackson. All of it sounds in the red.
“We are much more interested in the emotion of it instead of making sure it is absolutely on the grid,” Kitty says. “There might be some wrong notes on there and we might well keep them because we love the intensity and the aggression of the perform
