For SPIN's April issue, we caught up with one of the sexiest bands in rock, London-based duo the Kills: The banshee swath of black and leopard-print known as Alison Mosshart and her multi-instrumentalist pal Jamie Hince.

SPIN contributing photographer Nick Haymes shot the pair at music club Don Hill's in lower Manhattan as they prepared for the April 5 release of their excellent fourth album, Blood Pressures.

See outtakes from the photo shoot, along with excerpts from deputy editor Steve Kandell's feature story, on newsstands March 22.

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For SPIN's April issue, we caught up with one of the sexiest bands in rock, London-based duo the Kills: The banshee swath of black and leopard-print known as Alison Mosshart and her multi-instrumentalist pal Jamie Hince.

SPIN contributing photographer Nick Haymes shot the pair at music club Don Hill's in lower Manhattan as they prepared for the April 5 release of their excellent fourth album, Blood Pressures.

See outtakes from the photo shoot, along with excerpts from deputy editor Steve Kandell's feature story, on newsstands March 22.

START THE GALLERY >>>

For Blood Pressures, Mosshart, 32, and Hince, 42, expanded their noisy art-rock sound. Mosshart's experience singing with the Dead Weather helped the process. "I've enjoyed being in the middle and having things be really loud around my head," Mosshart says of fronting the full-force rock band co-starring Jack White. Adds Hince, "The experience gave her such great confidence."

They recorded Blood Pressures at Key Club Studios in Michigan with engineers Bill Skibbe and Jessica Ruffins, who worked on the Kills' 2008 LP Midnight Boom. To their familiar combo of caustic guitars and window-shattering drum machine beats they added new instruments, including piano, Mellotron, and octave pedals. Hince also toyed with a new guitar set-up, playing through seven amps simultaneously.

"The last record was so beat-oriented, like making playground songs, while this one is more about songwriting, " says Skibbe, who also worked on Dead Weather's Sea of Cowards. "We wanted to make sure there was a different mindset from Dead Weather, because the Kills aren't a 'rock band' in that same way. There's more of a sophistication to them."

Mosshart spent the last two years in close quarters with White and Co. while recording and touring in the Dead Weather, but her bond with Hince runs much deeper. "I have a different kind of relationship with those boys than I do with him. [Jamie and I are] like family—really like family," she says. "We've lived together and been through everything together."

Mosshart and Hince first met in London in 2002, when the frontwoman's punk group Discount was on tour. They soon began collaborating and formed the Kills.

"They came by the office and were very charismatic and intense, finishing each others' sentences," recalls Laurence Bell, founder and owner of Domino Records, who signed the Kills in 2002 after receiving a three-song CD-R by Hince's neighbor, an employee of London's famed Rough Trade record shop. "They were obviously inseparable ... early on, you'd feel like a voyeur watching this sexual tension play out onstage, but now they're not so insular, they're engaging other people more directly."

With the Dead Weather, Mosshart expanded her audience, resulting in a newfound celebrity. It's something Hince is all too familiar with -- his fiancé is model and tabloid regular Kate Moss. "It used to be that you could walk down the street and the world wouldn't know what you were wearing an hour later," sighs Mosshart.

With their in-your-face sound, intense live performances, and mysterious and sexy-cool images, the Kills are building their own rock myth. "People think I'm going to be really loud and aggressive when they meet me because of how I am onstage, and I like that," Mosshart says. "I don't think musicians should seem like down-to-earth, normal people. That's not inspiring to me. I want my heroes to be these crazy characters."

Pick up SPIN's April issue, on newsstands March 22.