Rainbow Kitten Surprise Gets Back to the ‘Bones’ of Their Sound on Energetic New Album: ‘We Went Down the Rabbit Hole’

When indie rock band Rainbow Kitten Surprise returned after six years away in 2024, fans weren’t sure what to think.

The band — which had become known since its genesis for its folk-meets-rock-meets-pop sound — threw a curveball at their audience with Love Hate Music Box, an expansive, genre-fluid LP that upended not only the group’s established sound, but their lineup as well, with bassist Charlie Holt exiting the group due to creative differences with lead singer Ela Melo. Critics praised the group’s experimental comeback. But as Melo describes it, fans weren’t as sold.

“We had been pursuing these sounds for so long,” Melo tells Billboard over Zoom. Sitting on her screen-in porch and dressed in a fluorescent blonde wig, a black choker necklace and a T-shirt, she takes a drag from her cigarette and sighs. “Then when we made Love Hate Music Box, it felt like the fans told us, ‘Okay, well, we’re not ready for this.’”

When it came time to start thinking about their next project, the quartet found themselves back at the drawing board, looking for something that could give them an opportunity to explore the new stations they occupied — Melo came out publicly as a trans woman in 2022 — while still giving the fans what they wanted.

Bones, Rainbow Kitten Surprise’s fifth studio album, manages to stick that landing. With a tight runtime and 10 freewheeling new songs, the band embraces the energy of its beloved live show throughout the new project, as the members jam out in the studio while riffing off of one another to make a collaborative, occasionally improvisational project. This time, Melo says, the goal was much simpler than reintroducing themselves to the world: “We really just said, ‘Let’s make a good rock album.”

Below, Melo breaks down how Rainbow Kitten Surprise created their new album, why many of the album’s lyrics were off-the-cuff ad libs, and how her transition has changed her approach to performance.

First off, congratulations on the new album Bones. How are you feeling about this almost being in the hands of your fans? 

It’s pretty incredible. We started working on the demos for it in June last year, and at the time, I remember we were scheduled to get in with Jay [Joyce, the album’s executive producer] in March [of this year], and it was just like, “Well, that’s forever away,” and now here we are. It’s just exciting to see something that started so small, even sonically, become so big. Just to see it come to life has been cool. Usually, album cycles for us — even on the shorter end of things — tend to be two or three years. Obviously, Love Hate was a lot longer than that, but even so, it’s just like seeing something come basically into full fruition in a year. It’s very fast.

Yeah, it feels like Bones came together lightning fast by RKS’ own release pattern, whereas Love Hate Music Box came together after a six-year hiatus. What about this album made its quick release necessary?

I mean, we put it out just about as fast as we could, but that’s true for most music. Most of the time it hits the label and then there’s, like, another six months of prep that goes around it to release the thing — that’s just the reality that the industry takes a lot of time, because you gotta print vinyl and stuff.

But as far as what was actually different between the last run and this run, there was just an excitement, I think. I almost felt like I was explaining myself on this record. It felt like [the fans] were telling us, “Wait, you just took six years off, and then you came with something that was really different. That’s cool, but like, what happened?” And so, this record is like, “Well, this is what happened.” We went down the rabbit hole.

So now, Bones is almost like a personal journal, lyrically and sonically. The goal really was, “Let’s make something that sounds a little bit more like RKS.” I remember we were doing a media training thing ahead of the last album, and I remember saying to the coach at the time, “Here’s how I see RKS; musically, it starts with a whisper and ends with a roar, and the band is that roar.” And I have to say, you really hear the band roar on this record. 

The lyrics on this album do feel very cathartic in that way it sounds like you’re saying what you’ve been wanting to say for years. How did you go about the process of putting the lyrics together for this album?

It’s very interesting that you say that — the process was, I would write the first verse, and then I would ad lib the rest. It was, “Okay, hit record,” and we would just roll with it. That’s why there are little interesting bits where it sounds like we’re just kind of playing with sounds almost. It became a stream-of-consciousness situation. When you take that approach, you just don’t get to censor yourself. What comes out is what comes out, right? That’s how you get that really raw sound and those emotional, vulnerable lyrics, because you literally can’t overthink it, and you don’t get to second guess, and you don’t censor. You just let out what you got, and sometimes that comes from a deep place that your conscious brain is not even really clicking on — you’re thinking one thing and what comes out is something different entirely.

That makes a lot of sense, because the sound of this album felt directly influenced by your live show. 

Yeah, and that’s partly because we cut it live. Once the demos were put in the studio, we would kind of riff off each other at the start of the day, playing around on our instruments, and we would eventually land on what felt like the right song to work on that day. And then once we’d found it, we’d establish our own guidelines. Like, “We need to play this guitar part in this spot of the song, and then we want that drum part here for this many bars,” and we would piece it together from there. I would pull up something on Spotify, play it, and go, “Can we get something that feels kind of like that for this part?” And then we would just roll tape and hit it.

For “Friendly Fire,” for example — [what you hear] was like the first or second with the band. We obviously hit it a little more when we went to Jay’s, but it happened very fast. That last build on [album closer] “Tropics,” for example, was us saying, “Dude, can we do something that sounds like this Flume song called ‘Free?’” It has the build over the whole song, and I really wanted to try that. We hit record, and everybody just went off, you know what I mean? I don’t know where it comes from sometimes, but I know when people are inspired and when you feel connected, good music happens. So we felt connected, for sure.

Has that improvisational approach to recording this album has made rehearsing and playing these songs in a live context any harder?

Way easier, actually! Because people remember how it felt, if that makes sense. Even if we’re like, “I couldn’t tell you exactly what it was I did,” we can still say, “I remember it went something like this.” Your muscles remember the feeling, especially when you have to do it in a high stakes situation. Those are honestly the kinds of parameters that we like to operate under. It feels like it’s the last minute and we got to get this together, thats how we roll.

Like, sometimes, I couldn’t tell you what the lyrics are to these songs. But as we get going, I’ll remember them, or they’ll come out one way or another. It’s part of what made this whole process faster. Love Hate was a much longer process, because we were like, “Oh, we’ve got to dial in all these synth sounds again, and we have to make everything just right.” For this one, it was just like, “Nope, we gotta go, let’s hit it.”

This is all coming in the middle of this huge amphitheater tour that you guys have been on — what’s the live experience of these songs been like so far, especially at another sold out Red Rocks show?

It’s been awesome. Yeah, it was definitely fun to come back to Red Rocks, man. In the week or so since that show, I won’t lie, we were struggling, because performing there is a hard thing to top, just emotionally speaking. But we’re gonna try, damn it!

The band has been using this tour as a simultaneous fundraising opportunity with the work that you have been doing with PLUS1 — why did you feel it was vital to make sure portions of those ticket sales were getting back to the LGBTQ+ community?

We’ve done it for a lot of reasons and causes before: Flood relief, when hurricanes came through North Carolina where a lot of us grew up, for a lot of other issues. It’s kind of a thing where there’s so many local agencies in every part of the nation that desperately need funding. So, being able to chain that through PLUS1, and through our umbrella company in order to make sure that money is getting to folks who are actively helping out the LGBTQIA+ groups was a no-brainer.

It’s all about the boots on the ground, the grassroots moment that we are in. That’s where the difference is often made. And you can really tell, it’s really palatable when you donate locally. I think it’s always important to do that kind of stuff, and that’s why we’ve done it for as long as we have. 

I know that this tour, along with the Love Hate Music Box Tour that you did last year, have both been your first experiences getting to tour with the group ever since transitioning. What has that experience of getting to perform now as the truest version of yourself in front of your fans been like for you?

Freeing. Incredibly freeing. It’s changed my singing, it’s really changed everything about the live experience for me. One of the things that I had to reconcile with that I didn’t know bothered me for so long was the tonal quality of my voice in transition. There would be times where I said, “Oh, s–t, this sounds too deep.” It was a weird sensation where, when I imagined myself talking, I didn’t sound like the way I did when I actually talked. I didn’t even realize I’d been wrestling with that my whole life. And I had to broker some kind of peace with it, especially ahead of these tours, because this is my voice. It’s not changing, it’s not going away, so I need to make good with that. Because if I don’t, then frankly, I’m not going to sing. 

It’s kind of made everything easier to sing. In early recordings, I was living under the false assumption — and in some ways, the false indoctrination — that I should have a deeper voice. You can hear it on those recordings, where it’s me pulling down, thinking, “OK, go for baritone, or baritenor. I gotta sing lower.” Because that’s what I thought people wanted to hear, that husky kind of voice, or that smooth, Frank Sinatra kind of thing. And when we got to Love Hate, I was just like, “What if I go the opposite direction? What if I try to soften and what if I try to get high and falsetto and breathy?” With Bones, I just sent everything right down in the middle. Now, I know what my voice can do either way I want to go. Let’s try and just do it all. Let’s just see what happens. And it f–king shows on this record. It’s crazy.

There’s all these webs you create in your own mind. Do you just run in circles, chasing your tail? No, what’s going to sound the best is just you just just singing. Like, you know how you want to sound, so make sure it’s what you want to be doing, not what you think everyone else wants you to be doing, not what you think you should be doing.