In the process of digging oneself out, a little rope could help. By the fall of 2022, Carrie Brownstein required it. Sleater-Kinney had just begun recording their taut and cathartic 11th album, Little Rope, when Corin Tucker—her co-creator, 30 years ago now, of the genius post-riot grrrl band—received a phone call from the U.S. embassy in Italy attempting to notify Brownstein that her mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident. Death clarified the air in the room of Little Rope, intensified its tenor, and distilled its priorities. All of the nascent songs—which amount to Sleater-Kinney’s sturdiest, catchiest rock record since 2015’s hiatus-breaking No Cities to Love and their most somber since 1999’s The Hot Rock—were immediately “dragged into the hellscape” of grief, Brownstein said in an interview, adding, “I needed to hear Corin’s voice.”
Sleater-Kinney are synonymous with determinedly clawing out a sense of self and ripping up patriarchal models to restructure the rock’n’roll order. But their Great Feminist Songbook has always included mortality, sorrow, and dying: the guttural punk standard “Good Things,” the hospital-room plea “The Size of Our Love,” the picture of a Golden Gate suicide on “Jumpers,” the dread-laced drama of comeback single “Bury Our Friends.” Even so, Sleater-Kinney have rarely plumbed such autobiographical reservoirs of sadness as they do on Little Rope, responding not only to loss but also self-doubt, societal despair, and depression. Brownstein said, “Finishing this record was basically my way of praying every day,” and her brutally vulnerable lyrics evoke spectral communion. “I forgive you, I wish I told you so,” she sings on the anthemic “Hunt You Down.” “I send your ashes my love.”
Little Rope is the fourth album of Sleater-Kinney’s second act, their second since drummer Janet Weiss left and subtracted an irreplaceable frequency. In the 1990s and 2000s, Sleater-Kinney seemed to contain their own secret language in the legendary criss-crossing interplay of Tucker and Brownstein’s dueling down-tuned guitars and counterpointed screams. “Living in Olympia, we had lost perspective on what a traditional group looked or sounded like,” Brownstein wrote of the origins of their entanglement in her 2015 memoir. “My entire style of playing was built around somebody else playing guitar with me, a story that on its own sounds unfinished, a sonic to-be-continued, designed to be completed by someone else.” Today that mysterious lexicon feels more transparent. The coordinates where Tucker and Brownstein once met—friction, unprettiness, imposing stakes, the shared consciousness of their work’s insurmountable consequence—have no doubt shifted. But still they meet. Togetherness remains Sleater-Kinney’s essence.
Tucker’s titanic vibrato and ferocious conviction are the anchors of Little Rope. She has audibly risen to the occasion, in every note, to support her friend. Little Rope often recalls the ’80s pop-rock stars of the two musicians’ childhoods and The Woods-era classic rock touchstones more than the raw spark of punk, even as the exploration and ecstasy of ’70s post-punk animates some its most thrilling songs. Tucker instantly matches the force of the monster riff crashing open “Untidy Creature,” the album’s liberationist wrecking ball of a closer, a reminder of that Black Sabbath poster on Dig Me Out’s cover.
Opener “Hell” quakes, an infernal picture of parenthood in the mass-shooting horrorshow of the United States, where “Hell is desperation/And a young man with a gun,” where, without gun control, life is merely theoretical. As Tucker screams, “You ask why like there’s no tomorrow,” the why breaks the roof off the song, and the doom becomes a demand to not look away from a world in crisis. The desolate cityscape “Six Mistakes” sprints after the tom-heavy minimalist swoop of drummer Angie Boylan (who has toured with Sleater-Kinney since 2019 and drums on the entirety of Little Rope); about two minutes in, Tucker’s hooks and Brownstein’s guitars ignite.
A lightly blown-out killjoy anthem, Brownstein’s terse, nervy “Needlessly Wild” documents those times in adulthood when repressing a restless punk ethos is not quite an option: “I’m aggressively fun/Death of the party/A lecture for one.” She bites deep into the word “hate” to express how little of it she possesses, turns “I’m totally tired” into an irreverent Fall send-up. Brownstein gives voice to her eternally maladjusted soul, too, on the self-steeling pep talk “Dress Yourself.” Though it was written before her mother’s death, it feels like a brooding maternal reprimand: “Get up girl and dress yourself/In clothes you love for a world you hate.” But the song’s unsparing depiction of depression builds as if stepping into light. As the band falls back, Brownstein’s yearning for “a new word/For that old pain inside of me” becomes an epic, clarion piano ballad, a way out through illumination.
“If you could talk, what would you say?” Tucker sang in 1997 on “One More Hour,” the immortal document of her and Brownstein’s own romantic fissure. There’s no question mark on Little Rope’s most stadium-sized song: “Say it like you mean it,” Tucker hollers boldly in a bittersweet rallying cry, reaching for a higher register with each windswept chorus, conducting all the triumph of a synth-streaked power ballad. Whether Tucker sings out to a friend, a partner, a child, culture at large—her desire is forthright. Perhaps to assuage the overwhelming uncertainty of their present circumstances, perhaps due to the confidence that accrues with age, “Say It Like You Mean It” is a beacon of solidity.
Audre Lorde once wrote that poetry is the “skeleton architecture of our lives,” offering keys to embody and unlock reality, to catalyze change. Her coinage applies easily to Sleater-Kinney songs. “Dig me out,” “Anger makes me a modern girl,” “Culture is what we make it” remain survival maxims. On Little Rope, Brownstein and Tucker craft a few more for Sleater-Kinney 2.0. “The thing you fear the most will hunt you down,” Brownstein sings, a colossal hook on the four-on-the-floor centerpiece “Hunt You Down,” drilling into her psyche as if to remember that facing the unknown brings relief. Like a Jenny Holzer slogan composed in iambic pentameter, the line is borrowed from poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch; it is a fact, as this band has always attested, more bearable with camaraderie. The lyric is a mantra when Brownstein sings it alone. When she and Tucker sing together, it becomes a monument.
