Sleater-Kinney hasn’t really been a riot grrrl band since 1996, and that’s being generous. Many would argue that they never were, and they’d probably be right. It was ’95 and it was Olympia, WA. Corin Tucker and Carrie Brownstein were practicing in a studio off of Interstate 5, right next to Sleater Kinney Road. Tucker was playing with Heavens to Betsy, Brownstein with Excuse 17. A little local band called Sleater-Kinney bubbled under the surface. In just a few years, it was ready to erupt.
They released their self-titled in ’96, Call The Doctor in ’97. Their records were staples at local gigs, but not big outside of that. It wasn’t until the following year, 1998, with the release of Dig Me Out and the addition of the inimitable Janet Weiss on drums, that the volcano of Sleater-Kinney finally blew. The trio of mod-feminist-punkers found their groove, settling into the perfectly Sleater-Kinney-shaped hole that Tucker could puncture with the fury of her vibrato, firing through the roof that Weiss’s drumming would blow off of any arena they played. They didn’t have to break through the glass ceiling; as soon as they started playing together, the whole thing would shatter.
This was almost 30 years ago, in a musical and cultural landscape that is near unimaginable now. And yet, here I am talking about Sleater-Kinney’s 11th studio album. Within seven years of Dig Me Out, Sleater-Kinney has not only remained relevant and artistically exciting, but they have cemented themselves as one of the most important American rock bands to have ever done it. This all culminated in the release of the 2005 album The Woods, a near-perfect exercise in the excitement of rock songwriting, and a record even more urgent than the power chords backing their first punk experiments.
We know the story from here: the trio called it quits in 2006, came back in 2014 for the utterly invigorating No Cities To Love, put out a live recording of a Paris show in 2017, before releasing the less-than-stellar St. Vincent-produced rock-pop pop-rock The Center Won’t Hold in 2019. Shortly after they unveiled The Center Won’t Hold, the group announced that Janet Weiss would no longer be continuing with Sleater-Kinney, and would not join the band on their upcoming tour. Later, Weiss would cite a shift within the band’s dynamic as the reason she left; she no longer felt like a creative equal to Tucker and Brownstein.
After that, we only have 2021’s Path of Wellness, a directionless, indiscriminate project that may just be the group’s least exciting to date. Now that we’re all caught up, I think it is safe to say 2024’s Little Rope is, far and away, the band’s most inspiring post-Cities release, an immediate result of Tucker and Brownstein’s natural and irreplicable chemistry. The feeling of the two playing together transcends the band’s messy history, overcomes the moments of messy, uninspired songwriting, and conquers the immense grief upon which Little Rope was built.
When the two began recording the first songs that would appear on Little Rope, Brownstein received a call that her mother and stepfather had died in a tragic car crash while vacationing in Italy. As the album progressed, it became more than just a sonic collaboration between two longtime friends and creative partners; it became a light to shine a path through grief, quite literally, a little rope, with room enough for two pairs of hands to hold onto as they pulled themselves out of a pit of despair.
Little Rope by no means approaches the flawlessness of The Woods, or even the paroxysm of femme-punk joy that was Dig Me Out. It doesn’t realize some past iteration of Sleater-Kinney’s potential, but rather a reminder that there’s still much to love about the group.
Little Rope is at its strongest when it’s turned up to eleven. Opening track “Hell” starts small, brooding, as Tucker almost whispers (or comes as close as she probably can to whispering), “Hell don’t have no worries / Hell don’t have no past. / Hell is just a signpost / when you take a certain path.” before the whole track opens up. Brownstein’s guitar wails along with Tucker’s vibrato, a confluence of pain and passion that can’t possibly be tamed. Part horror film soundtrack theatrics, part “Dig Me Out” for an eternally moving, ferocious future, “Hell” is good enough proof as any that Tucker and Brownstein are Sleater-Kinney.
Single “Say It Like You Mean It” is a battle cry, sustaining the energy with which it opens through its whole length. Tucker’s voice is clear, peremptory and biting, especially when she tells you to “Say it like you mean it.”. There is no way to deny her what she demands with that thundering backbeat and quirky, sporadic riffing from her and Brownstein.
Though the record is obviously not without its flaws, it sometimes becomes difficult to pinpoint precisely what is unsuccessful about it. Comparing it to their work decades ago seems to completely miss the point, reading the percussion as lackluster feels too obvious, too much of a projection of Weiss onto a recording that is intentionally crafted in her absence. There’s a messiness to the songwriting at times, too underwhelming to be chalked up to simply a product of the messiness of grief. I know they’re balancing sitcoms and husbands and the existential dread that comes along with having lived for half a century, but I keep yearning for them to open up, make their sound as big as it can possibly get without exploding out of the recording.
And sure, the record is some type of performance of grief. Even yet, there is a difference between performing grief and using performance as a vessel to work through, get at, or somehow otherwise experience grief. At its strongest, Little Rope is all vessel. Not a drastic pivot from their recent soundscape, nor a return to form from back in their riot grrrl days, but simply a portrait of the two women precisely where they are at this moment in time.
There is a particular art of knowing when to end things. When groups don’t quite know how to master it, we get Mick Jagger wailing on records like Dirty Work and A Bigger Bang. And perhaps Sleater-Kinney should have called it quits after The Woods, tying a neat little bow on a career characterized by a completely upward trajectory. But after listening to Little Rope, it seems that Tucker and Brownstein needed Sleater-Kinney, and showed us that even in 2024, we too still Need Sleater-Kinney. I just can’t keep myself from imagining what these songs would have sounded like with Weiss behind the kit.
