LA Hex

Album: God Games (2023)
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Songfacts®:

  • "LA Hex" is a play on the airport LAX, with the "H" standing for "hellish." Inspiration struck The Kills' Jamie Hince as he was trying to get back home at 2 a.m., standing on an LA street corner. The barrage of passing cars and the eclectic music pouring out of them left him feeling bombarded.

    "You'd hear sub bass and some trap snares, and then the other direction you'd hear a mariachi band and then a blast of rock and roll and some gospel choir," he told Apple Music. "And I just really loved that cacophony. It was really LA to me."
  • Hince started formulating a song in his head that wrapped all those elements up. "I loved it because it reminded me like LA is a driving city as, and it's like everyone's in a little capsule all the time, and you could sort of imagine these little conflicting capsules of emotion and feelings," he said. "So you got this sort of the hope and then the failure and the bitterness and the romance and all these things just colliding. So it went from there and it was written pretty quickly and I thought it wasn't going to be a Kills song."
  • The Kills released "LA Hex" with "New York" as the first singles from their sixth album, God Games. It was the pair's first new music, barring their cover of Saul Williams' "List Of Demands (Reparations)", since their 2016 album Ash & Ice.
  • Hince and Kills singer Alison Mosshart completed "LA Hex" at The Church Studios in London with producer Paul Epworth (Adele, Paul McCartney). The result is an upbeat track featuring layered, warping trumpets set against an entrancing, glitchy beat.
  • The Kills told The Sun Epworth is an old friend of the band. He was their very first soundman in 2002, when they "had two amps, a lightbulb and a couple of mics in a van."

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