IT’S NEARLY 30 years since Sleater-Kinney formed in Olympia, Washington, taking their utilitarian name from a road that ran by their rehearsal space. Their own path hasn’t come without its off-ramps and sudden diversions – having ended their first decade with 2005’s The Woods, they are now four albums into a reunion that began with 2015's No Cities To Love – but for Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein, Sleater-Kinney remains their primary drive. “It feels very precious, especially when you get older, to have something that’s your own world,” Tucker tells MOJO. “We’re the engineers, we’re the builders and that is a lot of psychic relief in a world you can feel you have very little impact on. We recognise that as a refuge and we retreat there together.”
That space’s protective powers were tested at the end of 2022, when Brownstein’s mother and stepfather were killed in a car accident while on holiday in Italy. While the album that would become Little Rope was largely written, loss and grief inevitably shifted the ground beneath the recording. “It changed the temperature of everything we were doing,” says Tucker. Brownstein has spoken about the band being a place of solace at this harrowing time, about taking comfort in their fundamental sound, finding shelter in her bandmate’s voice. Bottle Opener Zipper Puller
“It was really hard to watch one of my best friends suffering...” Sleater-Kinney’s Corin Tucker speaks to MOJO about the tragedy and grief behind Little Rope.
Yet if Little Rope offers consolation, it mainly comes from the sheer fact of its existence – dynamic, defiant, self-aware – rather than easy rock platitudes. While its ambiguous, tug-of-war title suggests rescue as much as restraint, a life preserver as much as a noose, it’s a record that rarely offers explicit hope or cheer. “Hell is just a place that we can’t seem to live without,” sings Tucker on first track Hell, a Pandora’s Box that once opened unleashes full symphonic metal. It strings a classic Sleater-Kinney highwire between the personal and political, the imagery suggesting both individual meltdown and a wider inferno (“Hell is desperation/And a young man with a gun”). Crusader is its hard-bitten comrade-in-arms, lip curled at those who believe their repressive, book-burning work is a holy mission, needling them with post-punk attitude and mocking heavenly harmonies. It does, however, extend a rare moment of collective comfort, a hand to the marginalised: “You’re never alone/We’re with you now/The words, the beat, the sound.”
Such all-out resistance is not Little Rope’s keynote mood, though. “I’ve been down so long/I pay rent to the floor,” sings Brownstein on Hunt You Down, fighting to stuff ballooning grief into a disciplined beat, trying to impose form on something unbounded. These songs often suggest it’s a struggle to rally one person into a functioning self, let alone rouse an army of the righteous. It’s testament to Tucker and Brownstein’s gifts, then, that an album that describes inertia, paralysis, the blotting out of hope, is their strongest since No Cities To Love.
While their reunion has endured, it’s not been without turbulence. Released in 2019, The Center Won’t Hold was a darkly synthesised attempt to strike out in slick new directions under the steely production guidance of Annie Clark, AKA St. Vincent, but it precipitated star drummer Janet Weiss’s decision to quit after 22 vital years. (Little Rope’s drums are provided by Angie Boylan, touring drummer since 2019). After self-producing their course-correcting last album, 2021’s Path Of Wellness, this time they have worked with producer John Congleton, a decision that seems to have stopped any second-guessing, facilitating a record that echoes – if not replicates – the urgent thrum of their early music.
That’s as it should be, though – as the middle-aged tribute to Mark E Smith runs on Needlessly Wild, “I’m glitched and unwired/I’m totally tired.” This is not a record about the engulfing, boundary-dissolving voracity of youth – described by Brownstein in her excellent memoir Hunger Makes Me A Modern Girl as being “amoebic” – but the burnt-out circuits of experience, their sudden startling sparks and shocks. Don’t Feel Right starts with a joyful rush before the painfully droll lyrics kick in: “I get up/Make a list/What I’ll do once I’m fixed/Read more poems/Ditch half my meds.” It grinds to a halt like somebody suddenly powering down where they stand.
The superb Needlessly Wild sounds like Lene Lovich bouncing off the walls, a riot of self-loathing and self-cancellation. Dress Yourself, meanwhile, unfolds over a pattering rhythm like a heartbeat on a pillow, issuing itself instructions to get dressed “in clothes you love/ For a world you hate”. On The Center Won’t Hold’s Love, Brownstein sang, “There’s nothing more frightening and nothing more obscene/ Than a well-worn body demanding to be seen”. Little Rope carves space for the well-worn mind, offering sharp perspective on moments when everything seems blunted.
The tang of apocalypse hangs over the relationship songs, too. Say It Like You Mean It is in the tradition of One More Hour (from 1997’s Dig Me Out), a break-up song with such raw edges it feels they will never knit back together. Tucker gives Six Mistakes a similar intensity, voice wire-stripped back to one vibrating filament, Iron Man guitars thudding like meteors around her. The Sonic Youth pop of Small Finds, meanwhile, seems to be written from a dog-like perspective (“can you gimme a little rope?”), expressing abject gratitude for scraps and bones.
Amid the album’s recurring dogs (or “hounds”), Untidy Creature’s nonspecific animal metaphor ends the record on a note of resistance: you might find yourself trapped, but there’s always a way to think yourself out: “you built a cage but your measurement’s wrong… I’ll pick the lock.” Little Rope is not an optimistic record, but for all the alienation in its circling riffs and martial beats, its existence stands as a challenge to everything that would take you down. Hell is probably round the corner, but here, at least, Sleater-Kinney burn with a fire that’s all their own.
Little Rope is out January 19 on Loma Vista. Pre-order/buy: Amazon/Rough Trade
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