This Is The Kit

This Is The Kit, the nom de plume of Kate Stables, has been in existence since the 00s, when Stables moved to Bristol and started playing and collaborating with local musicians. Now seven albums in, This Is The Kit has carried Stables from Winchester to Bristol to Paris, across tours and festivals and the admiration of critics and her peers. Among these are Sharon Van Etten, The National (Aaron Dessner appears multiple times on Moonshine Freeze), Chris Thile (of Nickel Creek, Punch Brothers, and now the host of A Prairie Home Companion), as well as Guy Garvey and much of BBC 6Music.

Her latest album, and third on Rough Trade Records, is the Gruff Rhys produced Careful Of Your Keepers, released in summer 2023. The album finds Stables as magnetic as ever, joined once again by her stalwart band of Rozi Plain(bass/vocals), Neil Smith (guitar), and Jamie Whitby-Coles (drums), and accented by a cascading horn quartet arrangement by Jesse Vernon.

Careful Of Your Keepers is daring and soft, cutting and warm–a wild feat of complexity and combined dispositions. There’s a shared language of the band’s family experience that is as audible as ever in these recordings, which boast beautiful instrumental performances that still leave the nuanced space required for Stables’ vocals to live at the forefront. According to her, the record centres on “The fragility of things. Of situations. Of relationships. Of humans. What we do to look after each other and ourselves. The passing of time and what that does to us, and how we live our lives going forward.”

“one of the most original and musically gifted artists of today.” The Independent

“Stables’ outside-the-box brand of folk music still sounds like nothing else you’ve ever heard.” Paste