Even before he started doing press for Midnight Boom, Jamie “Hotel” Hince had a pretty good idea what he was going to end up talking about. The Kills’ third album finds the guitarist-singer and his partner in grime, vocalist Alison Mosshart, moving beyond the heavily narcotized scuzz-blues of their debut, Keep on Your Mean Side, and its Cabaret Voltaire–coloured glitch-rawk follow-up, No Wow. Recalibrating its drum machine for the dance floor, the London, England–based duo suddenly seems hell-bent on throwing an old-school hip-hop house party for the lo-fi crowd. The Kills still sound dirty, distorted, and too cool for art school, but more than ever you can shake your ass to them.

One of the big inspirations for the album was Pizza Pizza Daddy-O, a ’60s documentary about inner-city American kids and the way they amused themselves by making up rhymes on the playground. If you’re looking for the birth of hip-hop, you can start there. Take the Kills’ fascination with Pizza Pizza Daddy-O, add the fact that DIY rapper Spank Rock helped produce Midnight Boom, and the result is that Hince has been bombarded by suggestions that the Kills set out to purposely unleash their inner hip-hop heads. Despite what you might hear on the brilliantly bouncy “Sour Cherry” or the infectiously elasticized “Cheap and Cheerful”, that’s not quite the case.

“So little thought goes into the music when you’re making it,” Hince argues, on the line from a San Francisco hotel room, where he’s recovering from a week of talking to journalists in New York. “It’s all spirit and instinct. But then afterwards, people start applying meaning to what you’ve done, which takes it further and further away from the initial instinctive spirit of what you’ve done and why you’ve made something.”

What he finds funny, then, is that once again the Kills have been completely misunderstood. That’s something they’re used to by now. As much as Hince set out to pay tribute to the likes of Cabaret Voltaire and Suicide with No Wow, nine out of 10 critics continued to pigeonhole his band as a lo-rent White Stripes with an unhealthy Andy Warhol obsession. As for Midnight Boom, despite what’s been written about the record, the guitarist suggests he wouldn’t know how to make a hip-hop record if he had a Def Jam how-to manual.

“I don’t know too much about hip-hop,” he says with a laugh. “It’s not something that I listen to. There were a couple of records—the Clipse’s Hell Hath No Fury and the Spank Rock record YoYoYoYoYo—that had a spirit and energy that I felt had something in common with punk and DIY. I really liked that sort of bedroom approach and the sense of rebellion that it has. But I’m not a connoisseur of hip-hop.”

The goal instead with Midnight Boom was to move forward musically, which has been Hince’s obsession ever since he decided that no human percussionist would ever be a match for a drum machine.

“More than anything, I wanted to make a rock ’n’ roll record that wasn’t retro,” he says. “That was my main aim.”

That mission was mostly accomplished. There are moments on Midnight Boom where the Kills’ past obsessions reveal themselves, with “Black Balloon” sounding like the Velvet Underground on a sunny Sunday morning, and “M.E.X.I.C.O.” sweetening the clattering trash-can rawk of Keep on Your Mean Side with shots of sugar-spiked pop. More often than not, however, Hince and Mosshart light out in new directions. From the menacing drum ’n’ six-string squelch of “U.R.A. Fever” to the beat-powered new wave of “Alphabet Pony”, the Kills have indeed managed to make a nonretro rock record.

Still, reinventing yourself is never easy (unless you’re Madonna or David Bowie) and Midnight Boom didn’t enter the world without a struggle. After maxing out their credit cards while struggling with the writing of the record in the States, the Kills had what Hince describes as a breakdown.

“We had all this material, and some days you’d think there were just a load of badly recorded acoustic songs, and others you could see all the possibilities of where they could go,” he says. “On one of those days, we went to the shop and had our credit cards declined. That’s when we realized we were really broke and our relationships were decaying back at home.

“Living away from home so much and being myopic and obsessed about a fucking record is absurd, really,” Hince continues, “and every now and then that catches up with you. We had this paranoid moment where we felt like we had nothing, so we took a stereotypical road trip to Mexico to run away from it all. After that, we listened back to things and I saw the Pizza Pizza Daddy-O documentary, which made me realize how we could interpret the songs we had written.”

Today, the Kills find themselves in a better, and decidedly funkier, place. The band’s profile has no doubt been raised by the fact that Hince is currently the main squeeze of Kate Moss, who—if the British tabloids are to be believed—has declared him marriage material. But the main reason the Kills have begun landing features like a recent fashion spread in Rolling Stone is that, with Midnight Boom, they’ve once again proved themselves to be one of the most impossibly cool and dangerously sexy acts in rock ’n’ roll. That you can now bust a move to them is just an added bonus.

The Kills play Richard’s on Richards on Wednesday (May 14).