Brit alt.metallers Saint Agnes know about pain. On their new album, Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin, Kitty A. Austen and Jon James Tufnell have also found it's made them less scared to open up and express their real selves...
He steals a glance at her and takes a deep breath.
“You can actually hear the microphone hitting the wall at the end of one song. Kitty was literally sobbing on the floor. Jesus, it was brutal. I felt so conflicted – should we even be doing this? It was like watching a wounded animal.”
Briefly overcome by the memory, Saint Agnes guitarist Jon James Tufnell has to stop. He’s recalling the riotous, electronic-fused outfit’s last album, 2023’s Bloodsuckers, an abrasive offering recorded in the troubled aftermath of singer Kitty A. Austen losing her mother.
“It was totally different this time,” she asserts, referring to latest work Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin, a no less upfront but easily more focused return. “This time I wanted to say yes to everything and try everything. And suddenly all your tightness and fear goes, which is something you can only learn though the process of embracing life.”
Kitty and Jon are the creative core of the London outfit. Technically a trio, completed by drummer Andy Head, Saint Agnes are willing underdogs with a taste for refreshing takes on punky, alternative noise and conformity avoidance in general. Fascinated by alt.rock and Nine Inch Nails they’ve grown ever stronger at spinning their own spells into evolving, industrial soundscapes. The latest recording has seen them walk away from an unsatisfying production session to do it all themselves. And nothing has been off the table.
“I’m someone that’s struggled to show my ideas in the past,” considers Kitty. “I’d get tight, nervous. But the experience of grief and everything that does to you just shakes all those feelings out of you, and I just got so bored of being like that. I thought, fuck it. With this record, ask anything you wanna ask me, I'll give it a go.”
The use of art to exorcise difficult emotions isn’t anything new, but in the case of Saint Agnes’ hyper-focused singer, it’s probably been a form of self-therapy that’s shaped both her difficult and exultant times.
“I'd say as I've grown as a person and life has kind of battered me down more and more over the years, then yeah, it’s been a constant outlet. I find it more satisfying to write from personal perspectives, even when you’re inhabiting characters and telling their stories.
“But when my mum passed away, it all became less an outlet and more of a necessity. I was just bleeding, really. I couldn't help but just be those emotions, everything spilling out all the time.”
Grief moves in strange patterns, different for everyone – but at some point there’s generally an epiphany, a wake-up call to live life while it remains a real and present thing. That desire to try new things, coupled with the band’s instinctive determination to manage everything themselves, gave Kitty the room to breathe that she needed. It also gave her a yearning to get back into the world, to articulate and connect.
“I found that deeply satisfying, to be honest,” she marvels, “and it was just about connecting with people more. When I would speak to people it was resonating and connecting, plus it’s so much easier to articulate feelings in writing where I’ve got time and space. And so with this record, it's all really personal.”
“A big part of it is about making yourself known,” adds Jon. “Both of us feel that in our day-to-day lives we are regularly misunderstood, and that we regularly misrepresent ourselves. When you're making music, you've got time to say to yourself: this is what I think. This is what I want to say. This is what I want to sound like. This is a true representation of me, and that's what we're constantly striving towards sonically and lyrically.”
While feeling like an outsider has always informed Kitty’s lyrics in Saint Agnes, Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin finds her and band in snappier, more confident mood. She confronts depression and grief head on (The Beast and Get Them Out), lambasts toxic masculinity (Good Boy), wallows in childhood hopes (Song For Mia), but perhaps most pointedly celebrates what it is to be different. The Ghost is one of several tracks with that elusive happy/sad vibe – we’re going but at least we get to go together…
“We were talking to each other about how frustrating it is not to be heard, when this phrase came up: 'I feel like a ghost,' ” remembers Jon. “Saying important things and then having others just glossing past them. I could see the hurt in that, and it was something I recognised in Kitty. I think both of us have always felt quite lonely, and then we met each other and now have a best friend and we talk about everything.”
Certainly, the 2026 version of Kitty A. Austen, the one that sounds every inch as powerful as a Grecian goddess on her new material, is a happier and more confident soul than the one behind Bloodsuckers. That said, she still recoils at the thought of being held up as a role model, or of fans looking to follow her example.
“We love the fact that people resonate with the music, but there is a responsibility, even at our level, that comes with those things. I find it very uncomfortable because I'm just a person. Don't look to me for anything. I'm a messed-up person.”
Ultimately, the strength that Kitty now has through Saint Agnes has come from looking inwards into its creative core, rather than outwards at what others are doing or what they might expect from her. The band is certainly an expanding force in creative terms, but perhaps more significantly, they continue to be a safety net, a refuge for each other. Jon talks about how potentially expensive studio sessions with a producer came to nothing, the band doing far better by handling it all themselves. Such things seem typical and say much for Saint Agnes as a self-assured unit – both protective of each other and capable of ever greater musical potency.
“Backs against the wall is our default setting,” he rues. “From those do our best moments come. It's horrible because you try to avoid it. But we played a show recently – I won’t name it cos the in-house crew were clearly out of their depth – but you know what? As a result, we played this fucking chaotic, ferocious set where we just kind of destroyed everything. It was amazing. How do we continually get ourselves into that headspace? With pain, certainly, and that’s not good for your long-term health!”
Given that aptitude, perhaps the final round of exorcism, the ultimate catharsis for the previously tormented singer is yet to come. It’s going to happen on the road. “It’s what we’ve always wanted,” she affirms. “I feel like touring and playing live is our home. You have to come and see the band live because that’s where we're in our element.”
And while Kitty might admit to lacking confidence in certain areas, with Saint Agnes she knows exactly what weapons she’s got.
“I do think we are genuinely different to a lot of stuff that's out there,” she concludes. “People who love loud music and everything about it, but might find themselves looking for the heart in it. I think we can be at that heart. We love to put on the kind of punky rock show where we don't know quite what's gonna happen. That to us feels exciting, so yeah, if people are uncertain about it, come and see us and then make up your mind.”
Your God Fearing Days Are About To Begin is released on May 29 via Spinefarm.
Read this next:
