KITTIE Celebrates 25th Anniversary Of Landmark Debut Album With 'Spit XXV' EP

Canadian heavy music pioneers KITTIE mark a quarter-century milestone with the announcement of "Spit XXV", a four-track EP celebrating the 25th anniversary of their gold-certified debut album. The collection features freshly updated and re-recorded versions of four of the albums biggest tracks, "Brackish", "Charlotte", "Do You Think I'm A Whore" and the title track, "Spit", all produced, once again, by Garth Richardson who helmed the original 1999 sessions at EMAC Studios.

The EP arrives September 19 via Sumerian Records, with the brand new version of the title track, "Spit XXV", available today across all streaming platforms.

Speaking about the milestone project, KITTIE vocalist/guitarist Morgan Lander reflects: "It's hard to believe that 25 years after its release, and almost 30 years since KITTIE began, people are still talking about 'Spit'. There is something truly unexplainable in why our debut album is still resonating with people, finding a new audience and has had such a lasting impact on so many.

"Reimagining some of these classic songs for the 25th anniversary of 'Spit' was a lot of fun and a true testament to their longevity. It reveals just how relevant in the musical landscape they still are today. We were honored to work with Garth again where it all began after more than two decades, and doing so was a cool way to pay homage to the past while updating these songs with a modern sound, bringing them into the future."

Released on January 11, 2000, "Spit" transformed KITTIE from four Canadian teenagers into international heavyweights, achieving gold certification with over 660,000 U.S. sales. The album became a defining moment for women in heavy music, with its aggressive sound and uncompromising attitude proving that metal made by women could achieve both critical respect and commercial success during nu-metal's completely male-dominated peak era.

The original "Spit" earned critical recognition from Rolling Stone, who ranked the title track No. 82 on their "100 Greatest Heavy Metal Songs Of All Time" in 2023. The album's influence continues rippling through generations of musicians, with artists like Serena Cherry of SVALBARD crediting it as "the reason she became a metal musician," while experimental artist Poppy covered the title track in 2023.

The "Spit XXV" EP arrives as KITTIE continue their triumphant second chapter following 2024's critically acclaimed comeback album "Fire", their first new material in 13 years. The album reached No. 13 on U.K. Rock & Metal Albums charts and No. 20 on Billboard Top Album Sales, while single "We Are Shadows" became the band's highest-charting song on the Billboard Mainstream Rock Airplay chart at No. 20. The album earned the band a 2025 Juno Award nomination for "Metal/Hard Music Album Of The Year", confirming their continued artistic evolution.

Reuniting with Richardson again proved both nostalgic and revelatory for the band, who last collaborated with the producer during their breakthrough era. The reunion has allowed KITTIE to approach these foundational songs with two and a half decades of musical growth while maintaining the raw power that made them revolutionary.

Since returning from their hiatus in 2022, KITTIE has experienced a remarkable resurgence across demographics, with their 784,700 monthly Spotify listeners spanning longtime fans and new generations discovering their music through social media. Their performances at major festivals including Sick New World, Welcome To Rockville and Sonic Temple have demonstrated the band's enduring live power, while their successful 2024 North American headline tour proved their enduring and undeniable ability to command stages as headliners.

"Spit XXV" EP track listing:

01. Spit XXV
02. Do You Think I'm A Whore? XXV
03. Brackish XXV
04. Charlotte XXV

In a recent interview with Andrew Slaidins of The Rockpit, Morgan Lander stated about the lyrical and musical inspiration for the "Spit" album: "Yeah, well, it's tough, because — well, if you look at 'Brackish', for instance, it was the first song that we had written as a band together. And so I think at that time, I might have been 14 years old. What kind of life experience do you truly draw from? And so our bubble was small, our world was small, our experience was limited, but I think, as young people, you still have perspective, you still see things in a certain way, you still feel things. Especially being so young, you feel things very deeply. And I think that is what resonated a lot with people, hearing the emotion that was sort of put into it. But a lot of it was just our own life experiences."

She continued: "'Brackish' is about a friend in a toxic relationship. [Some of the other songs on the album are about] other experiences of just being a woman in a band and going out there in the world and sort of being judged or looked upon differently. Yeah, just a lot of those kinds of concepts were in it as well.

"We did have a lot of interesting experiences, being as young as we were, being women and playing out there in the world," Morgan added. "And even with the first album, the experiences that we wrote, they were about that stuff. It was very close to home, though. Not — I don't wanna say too deep, but I think the emotion and the seriousness was there."

Asked how she feels about "Spit" now, 25 years later, Morgan said: "It's interesting. For a really long time, I sort of felt like there was a real push sort of maybe in the mid-to-late 2000s to sort of get away from the idea of 'nu metal'. Our first album is a very nu metal-influenced sound and it truly is really the only album that we did that really kind of really harnessed those ideas and those influences. And for a long time, nu metal was a bad word. And while we did still play a lot of those songs live, we did musically gravitate away from that, and it had a lot to do with, I think, just trying to branch out and try different styles, but also prove ourselves as more than just a nu metal band or a one-trick-pony-type thing. And that's just the chip on our shoulder that we've always had. It's always like, well, we still have to feel… It's tough — the pressure to feel like you always have to prove yourself. But I think I've come to realize how important 'Spit' was, how influential it was, how much it did resonate with people and how the nu metal sound that we had was, it was fun. And it only lasted for one album, but the impact of that single album has lasted for the duration of our career. We are, 25 years later, still talking about the album. People are still listening to the album, a lot of them. And so it's really interesting to me that it has had the staying power."

In a 2002 interview with Ballbuster Music, KITTIE drummer Mercedes Lander stated about "Spit": "I think 'Spit' is probably the least polished record I've ever heard in my entire life. It was recorded in nine days on Fender Squires. It was a point in our lifetime, and it was like a snapshot of what we were like back in 1999."

She added: "We'd been a band for so long, we played over 200-some-odd shows before we got record label interest. We were playing every weekend that we could. Sometimes we were playing during the week. We traveled to Toronto, to Detroit; we played a lot of shows. A lot of bands that play 12 shows before they get signed, they sound like crap on their record; they're experimenting on their recording, and they don't know what they want to do. We were just lucky because we knew what we wanted to do."

When you discovered KITTIE has a direct influence on how you see them. For those on board from the beginning with "Spit" in 2000, KITTIE was part of nu-metal's explosive rise. Through later albums including "Oracle" (2001),"In The Black" (2009) and "I've Failed You" (2011),the band evolved into something far more sinister, viewed as a serious metal outfit. After a prolonged hiatus broken only by a 2017 hometown show and 2018's documentary "Kittie: Origins/Evolutions", the band returned in 2022 following festival offers including Sick New World.

12.6 million career streams later, vocalist/guitarist Morgan Lander, drummer/backing vocalist Mercedes Lander, guitarist Tara McLeod and bassist Ivy Vujic maintain that KITTIE never broke up because it remains ingrained in their identity. Their 2024 album "Fire", produced by Nick Raskulinecz (FOO FIGHTERS, RUSH, ALICE IN CHAINS),marked their triumphant return with renewed fury and unfathomable sonic brutality. As KITTIE now pay homage to their past whilst also bringing it firmly into the present day, with the new "Spit XXV" EP, the new era of KITTIE continues to blaze forth, illuminating the way as they take their rightful place as torchbearers for heavy music.

Photo credit: William Felch