COVER STORY | Sleater-Kinney Ground Themselves in a Hope Untamed

It’s the spring of 1997 and Dig Me Out is on a fast-track to selling 60,000 copies in its first year on the shelves, but the band that made it were on the road and hadn’t the slightest idea. Sleater-Kinney, along with crew member, roadie, security, merch salesman and therapist Tim Holman, were touring the United States in their van and, when stopped at a gas station, found a review of their new record in TIME Magazine. “We couldn’t believe it,” Carrie Brownstein, 49, says. “We were in the middle of nowhere, driving ourselves to a show. [Tim] bringing that magazine back into the van and reading our review and it not being in a music magazine—it wasn’t SPIN or Rolling Stone or Option or CMJ or Alternative Press or even some fanzine. It was one of the most mainstream publications in America, something that our parents and grandparents and their friends and neighbors would also read. At that moment, I think we definitely knew that we were no longer just a band in Olympia.”

Folks have long considered Dig Me Out to be Sleater-Kinney’s breakthrough record, and I think that wager still holds water now, 27 years on. But what it meant to achieve a breakthrough in 1997 is far different than what it is now, a time when any music blog can call any record good and it might move the needle a very minimal amount. When Sleater-Kinney put out Call the Doctor a year earlier, they were lucky to get 10-20 people to a gig. After the TIME review, they were selling out clubs across the country. “It was packed houses for every single show,” Corin Tucker, 51, explains. “And we came home with a little bit of money from that tour for the first time ever. It changed everything, because we were suddenly like, ‘Oh this is actually something we could do. We might be able to have a career with this. We might be able to be a national act.’”

Cut to now, in 2024. Sleater-Kinney, who first emerged from the riot girrrl feminist punk scene in Olympia, Washington, have made 11 records in total and gone through not one, but two comebacks as a band. After putting out a near-perfect The Woods in 2005, it’d be another 10 years until we’d hear from them again, when they returned in 2015 with No Cities to Love—and it felt like Tucker, Brownstein and drummer Janet Weiss hadn’t skipped a beat with each other. The Center Won’t Hold would be the last Sleater-Kinney album released as a trio, as Weiss said it was “time for me to move on” on Twitter. Since releasing Path of Wellness in 2021, Sleater-Kinney have governed as a duo—re-emerging with the same type of communion they first forged together as students at Evergreen State College once upon a time, playing in separate bands, Heavens to Betsy and Excuse 17, and touring together before joining forces and shredding side-by-side.

When Sleater-Kinney announced their newest album, Little Rope, my Twitter feed was filled with the same discourse it stockpiled when Path of Wellness was announced: How can the band continue without Weiss on the kit? The wound was re-opened, as some Sleater-Kinney purists came out of the woodwork to admonish Little Rope before it could get its legs. And perhaps those reservations weren’t out of haste, as Path of Wellness was their worst-reviewed album since before the Dig Me Out days. But, while Weiss’ smattering percussion was no doubt a crucial piece of the band’s puzzle for seven albums, the spotlight has routinely remained on the collision-course of Brownstein and Tucker’s compatible, necessary talents. And on Little Rope, it becomes clear that Sleater-Kinney is their band, and that these two women were put on this planet to make music with each other. It’s not a return to form so much as it’s a taut re-assemblage of a band’s misplaced spirit.

Little Rope is ushered in by the opening track (and lead single) “Hell.” In a world where sequencing doesn’t garner as much cultural adoration as it once did, “Hell” is a mighty stirring first chapter, and one that Sleater-Kinney quickly saw as such. “I think, once we were recording, that felt like the song that would introduce the album in the way that it needed to be introduced—with everything laid on the line, with the contrast between quiet and haunted and just overtaken by terror and screeching,” Brownstein says. “That was the right way to be inside of this record. But we were toying with duality and everything in-between, in a landscape—a context—that was uncertain and slightly disorienting and loud.”

The album features a lot of bold moments that aren’t always present in the Sleater-Kinney catalog, be it the jangliness of a song like “Don’t Feel Right” or even the light, racing instrumentation on a song like “Say It Like You mean It.” Someone said it’s their most complex record yet, and I’m inclined to agree with them. The risks Tucker and Brownstein take on Little Rope is a product of where they’re at as songwriters and experimenters. They wrote extensively this time around; Brownstein even spent eight to 10 hours on single parts of songs. The album was an obsessive, immersive endeavor. “We thought a lot about composition,” Brownstein explains. “There was just a thoroughness and a slight obsession—which is a different kind of obsession than when you are young and you’re able to channel everything as a catharsis. But what you’re actually doing is putting forth years of ideas that you just haven’t actually codified yet or formalized. There’s a freshness there but, now, I think the obsession was different. It was not about collating or collecting all of this energy, but diving very deep into the world of it. And I think that exploration made the album have a depth and a vastness and a sophistication that we maybe had not had the time to do—or just didn’t do in a while.”

While Path of Wellness came out in June 2021, Sleater-Kinney wrote the first song for Little Rope, “Untidy Creature,” in the spring of that year. It has that classic instrumentation of big riffs and Tucker singing a momentous chorus. But at that point, it was hard for her and Brownstein to see what the album was. “You’re never sure if a new song signifies a new album, because it doesn’t feel like it’s in that place of intention and urgency,” Brownstein says. Slowly, she and Tucker started filing away more and more. Tucker brought in the “Say It Like You Mean It” demo, while Brownstein wrote “Needlessly Wild” and, then, everything started to take shape and a feistiness in the songs began to emerge. “There was an irascibility and urgency,” Brownstein continues. “But, with each album and with this one, too, there is this re-commitment that has to take place between Corin and I. And then, individually, towards the band itself. Are we committing to this endeavor? Is there a need to the doing and the making? And that’s hard, sometimes because, yes, in theory, we want to continue. But you’re seeking the inspiration and the muse in some ways, and that can be difficult. So that’s where we started and then, eventually, we realized that the album was there, that it was percolating.”

By that time, they’d started looking into a possible studio—which would end up being Flora Recording & Playback in Portland, Oregon—and having conversations with producer John Congleton. “It always takes a while before you feel like you’re locked in to something that’s propulsive,” Brownstein concludes. Congleton—whose recent credits include Local Natives’ Time Will Wait for No One, Explosions in the Sky’s End and AJJ’s Disposable Everything—came from a similar indie and punk rock background as Sleater-Kinney and knew how to guide them back to their best-sounding selves by pushing all of the right buttons for them. He urged Tucker to make her vocals on “Say It Like You Mean It” sound louder, more intense and more full-on. The band, along with Congleton, were able to really develop the track into something that felt like a truly realized song by having more patience and tools at their disposal than they did 25 years ago.

“[John] said, ‘That’s not interesting enough,’” Tucker says. “He really wanted that raw emotion to come out. I went home and I rewrote the whole vocal melody. I didn’t change the words, but I changed the melodies to make it more intense and make it a broader palette. It started as much quiter and it ended up much louder in the end. That was just a much stronger place for the vocal to go on that song. In the end, I’m almost screaming. It was raw, and it wasn’t pretty. It was ugly and my voice broke a million times, and that’s where he wanted us to go—to go to the edge of things, where you’re not thinking about how something sounds for other people. You’re just breaking up in the sound, in terms of the story and the emotion there.”

Little Rope is a record that was impacted by the deaths of Brownstein’s mom and stepdad, who both were involved in a fatal car accident while on vacation in Italy in 2022. Songs like “Hell,” “Needlessly Wild” and “Untidy Creature” existed before the tragedy struck, but the songs were dragged into this newly realized landscape and liminal space of precarity and loss and searching and desperation that elevated the stakes. Brownstein retreated to the haven of the music in the wake of loss, cutting nearly eight iterations of a song like “Hunt You Down” and fiddling with the melodies of the other tracks she and Tucker had already begun sketching out. Things—for Sleater-Kinney and for Brownstein, especially—had become dire. During the recording process, she told Tucker that she needed her to sing more. The volleying lead vocals back and forth that the two musicians had done for the last four, five albums had fallen away. “I felt very incoherent with grief. I felt very beat down,” Brownstein explains. “And I didn’t feel like singing was where I could really express myself, nor did I have the strength to. So I think, for the first time in many, many years, you have an album where Corin is really belting it out. And I needed to hear that voice. Corin’s voice is a voice I’ve needed to hear since I was 19 years old, so it just took us back to something so fundamental—in terms of our relationship to each other, our friendship, our reliance on one another.”

On Little Rope, Sleater-Kinney are communicating with each other through the songs. The album isn’t necessarily about the grief Brownstein was experiencing, but the way they both lend their talents and energies to the music was their way of navigating the tragedy together. “When one of your best friend’s parents die suddenly, you are also thrust into a different world. The songs just all ended up being very untamed,” Brownstein continues. “And untamed doesn’t necessarily mean vile or ugly, it can also mean a very untamed kind of joy or an untamed kind of hope. But, it is a very sophisticated, raw version of those emotions matched with sophisticated writing. It carries all of that messiness and, then, that’s what the album really came into being.”

Hearing these songs that were not informed by grief at first but, through the process of performance and recording, became volumized by it, Brownstein felt beholden to the emotional place Little Rope took her to, especially “Untidy Creature” and what Tucker was able to convey with her voice. “She’s just wailing. I fundamentally understand that sound,” Brownstein says. “When she went and re-did ‘Say It Like You Mean It’—the desperation, the expression of loss, the putting it all on the line in those lyrics and then that vocal performance—I would cry every time I listened to that song after we first recorded it. A lot of it reminded me why I need music and why I need the band and why Corin and I still write music together. It was cathartic in that way, especially because we worked so hard on it with such deliberation that, to just be able to sit in the aftermath of it and listen to it, it was very profound.”

To hear your own mourning being sung by not just somebody else, but by one of the most important people in your life, it’s the type of surrendering to vulnerability that not many musicians are willing to commit to. But Tucker’s voice is quite visceral all across Little Rope. Through her screams and vocal breaks, blemishes flourish. For Tucker and Brownstein both, being able to write a record like this nearly 30 years after forming the band is a gift. When the duo was younger, they operated by the first idea, best idea method, because they were impatient and had not yet arrived at the nuance that comes with aging. “I think being able to have another chance at writing songs that express a whole range of emotions and have the kind of control that I have now as a singer and the expression I have, I feel really grateful,” Tucker notes. “It’s just a joy to be able to fully, I think, use all of our skills in crafting these songs—not just emotionally, but in terms of the kind of composition and range we can do now as writers.”

Sleater-Kinney have always been unafraid of following their own muses. There are such vivid shifts in intentionality across their entire catalog, be it going from shaping a record about survival and heartache like Dig Me Out to procuring a comeback album like No Cities to Love to being so informed by a desire to lend more space and focus to the process of music-making on Little Rope. Part of songwriting for Tucker and Brownstein involves opening the door to an idea and exploring it. “It can be a moment of outrage and a moment of sadness, a moment of loneliness,” Tucker notes. “All of the darker emotions, I think, are more inspiring than joy, but it’s often when you write about those things that you find joy in that song. And, oftentimes, it can just be a melody. With ‘Small Finds,’ it was just us playing guitar and coming up with this weird ass thing. You have to follow it down; you have to surrender to really immersing yourself in the possibility of the song and the melody and, if there’s a story there all the way to the end, to see if it holds water, if it feels believable. That’s the test you have for a song when you come back to it the next day.”

I return to Sleater-Kinney’s Y2K records a lot, especially One Beat and the way they both shred on a song like “Oh!” There’s a rawness in there, but it also feels dangerously precise. Songs on Little Rope, like “Six Mistakes and “Small Finds,” carry similar imperfections that are tangible and integral to the record and the emotional muscles flexing throughout it. The balance is both a fine-tuned, always activated characteristic of Tucker and Brownstein’s 30-year chemistry together and a product of being together in a room with loud amps and bouncing off the walls with each other and riding momentum and trust. That’s a lexicon of Sleater-Kinney now and it always has been.

“Part of the sonic world of this band is squirrely guitar lines that are not necessarily traditional that sort of vacillate between terse and loquacious,” Brownstein says. “And they’re surfy and punk and a little bit unhinged. But I also just really love volume and feedback and making things kind of gross at times. Disgusting. Those are the adjectives that Corin likes using, too. It’s like, ‘Ugh, that’s not digusting enough.’ I really am okay with that with guitar. That, to me, is actually the beauty of guitar—that it has that range and the grotesqueness can be perfect, it can be raunchy. There’s not a lot of instruments that can do that.”

I love how Sleater-Kinney is still loved and adored, even by folks who are my age who grew up 10 years after Dig Me Out blew up. With Spotify algorithms, TikTok influencer recommendations, playlists and a renowned interest in crate-digging, sharing music with others is still as important and as prominent as ever. This new wave of consumption has bought Sleater-Kinney another lifetime or two of relevance. You can hear it in Bully’s music, or the work of someone like Blondshell, who exudes the same fulcrum of attitude in her work that Tucker and Brownstein long have. While Brownstein often considers conflation to often be a flattening and deadening meshing of things that she thinks should be more nuanced, she holds a great deal of excitement when hearing younger artists using guitar-based music as the conduit for which they express themselves, who are reimagining vintage sounds and bringing them to the fore and forcing them to reckon with the present day and making things sound new or making things sound “pleasingly old.”

“I appreciate—especially in younger generations, particularly Gen Z—this appreciation for music that speaks to them that eschews demographics and really has nothing to do with age,” she says. “A young person will go and see Bruce Springsteen or Lucinda Williams or listen to Mary J. Blige, and then they will go listen to Steve Lacy or they will listen to Olivia Rodrigo or Palehound. That, to me, is really reassuring and it bodes well for us—because, I think, there was a time to age within this context. To age publicly was sort of the death knell, because everyone was searching for the new. And, of course, we still are. We want things novel, we want things fresh. But, to me, freshness or innovation doesn’t always come from the young, and I like the spectrum of storytelling that people are open to. It is a really wonderful time to be alive and to be playing music, so we’re really, really eager to continue.”

You can examine a lot of parallels between the late 1990s and now, and Sleater-Kinney records fit into both worlds. 25 years ago, the mainstream felt like it had lost much of the alternative framework that grunge and post-punk and metal had vaulted into it in the early part of the decade. Yet an LP like Dig Me Out endured, and there were hints of that heaviness on the pop charts—whether it was bands like No Doubt or Nimrod-era Green Day chasing accessibility. Now, we’re seeing artists like Rodrigo pulling influence from Y2K radio rock in her own pop musings. Even if the naysayers are insisting that rock ‘n’ roll is dead, that guitar-centric style that Sleater-Kinney fostered long ago always rears its head into what the present zeitgeist is enjoying. Even if there are flickers of reinvention (like on Path of Wellness and The Center Won’t Hold), the music always comes back to the guitar. And that’s a vernacular Tucker and Brownstein have been using for almost 30 years now. The guitar is a vessel for the duo, it’s where they re-center themselves and, from there, they can expand and deviate and innovate. It’s the core of their sound, and an irreplaceable storytelling instrument for them.

“Corin and I started out writing songs together in one of our apartments, playing riffs back and forth and singing,” Brownstein says. “That’s the language we use, and that is most familiar to us. And, while we aren’t purists and we have been elastic with our idea of what Sleater-Kinney is or how we approach songwriting or what instrumentation might appear on one of our albums, there is something fundamental and emotional about the connection, about the interplay of guitars for us. I still find the guitar a very expressive instrument. I find seeking out tones to be a very satisfying process. I still love distortion. I also think that I returned to the act of playing guitar as a way of almost recommitting myself to the ritual—the sacredness—of music. It’s my way of expressing myself, and I think there’s always something in that, playing with Corin and the way that my guitar and her voice go together, that feels like something essential and sacred in Sleater-Kinney.”

Matt Mitchell reports as Paste‘s music editor from their home in Columbus, Ohio.