When Path of Wellness came out in 2021, it seemed like Sleater-Kinney had jumped the shark. After rebranding as pop superstars sans guitars for the monochrome synth-pop of the St Vincent-produced The Center Won’t Hold, Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker unceremoniously parted ways with long-serving drum goddess Janet Weiss, whose kinetic playing was, literally, a third of their sound, make-or-break for the whole operation. Sleater-Kinney hurriedly pivoted back to guitars—to the sluggish capital-R rock of Path of Wellness, which wasn’t boldly different or a return to form. Concurrently, every pre-The Woods song was culled from live setlists. The one exception was, tellingly, “One Beat,” which posits: “If I’m to run the future, you’ve got to let the old world go.”
Towards the end of last year, two things happened: The band released a song better than most things from those previous two records—“Hell,” the squawking, blown-out lead single from the new album Little Rope—and, happily, as of one of their most recent shows, filled their setlist with a bunch of back catalog gems, ostensibly finding a way to coexist with their history rather than stranding it in quarantine. Oh, how I’m relieved “Oh!” is back in rotation. And I’m relieved Sleater-Kinney is back! You can almost feel the collective wave of relief sweeping their fandom as the sizzling chorus of “Hell,” the album’s opener, surges out of the darkness, and even more so when “Needlessly Wild”’s malfunctioning guitar sputters and unswerving motorik beat kick in.
Indeed, this 11th studio album is not only much better than Path of Wellness, it finds the band moving forward in a balanced, logical way—trading the jarring handbrake turns of that 2019-2021 era for the subtle gentrification that guided their sound from day one through their reunion. It splits the difference between One Beat and No Cities to Love with some of The Center Won’t Hold’s sleek, silver caramel sealing the gaps.
This feeling of new hope is succinctly telegraphed by the Brownstein-led “Don’t Feel Right,” whose bouncy major-key verse collars you and plants a kiss. “I get up, make a list / What I’ll do, once I’m fixed / Read more poems, ditch half my meds / Dress my age, call back my friends,” Brownstein huffs in her signature first-thing-in-the-morn moan-sing, the regular rhyme scheme and solid rhythm tickling you under the chin. It’s especially impactful because Little Rope employs Brownstein’s voice more sparingly than previous records, a deliberate choice enabling her to channel more energy into her playing.
As a whole package, the album clicks like the previous two didn’t. It’s tight and thick, glossy but bristly. It’s hot rock! The guitars come in slaloming single-string strands and fizzing slabs of fuzz. Corin Tucker still bellows like Aretha Franklin-via-Poly Styrene, as on “Untidy Creature,” an epic closer with its din of oscillating keyboards and anthemic half-time feel. She sounds just as good on the otherwise humdrum singalong single “Say It Like You Mean It,” the closest the album gets to those St Vincent-esque tendencies. Its lighters-in-the-air chorus will elicit begrudging admiration from half the OG fans and eye rolls from the other half. Some, including me, might manage both at once.
The band’s choice of producer contributes to Little Rope’s sense of synergy. John Congleton is an indie rock security blanket, a failsafe. His projects—Death Cab For Cutie’s 2022 return to form, Bully’s crunch-pop apex Sugaregg and Alvvays’ dreamy fan-fav middle child, Antisocialites—meld underground aesthetics with commercialization, grit with glitter. Congleton ensures, above all else, that Little Rope’s sonics match up with Brownstein and Tucker’s vision. And their vision was, largely, to use their music and their love for one another to light a path through grief; the album is dedicated to Brownstein’s late mother, who perished in a car accident along with her husband (Brownstein’s stepfather) in the autumn of 2022. While loss, pain and connection have always defined Sleater-Kinney’s work, Little Rope feels especially imbued with an emotional acuity and intensity, one that I don’t think they have captured this potently since “One More Hour.”
For all of this, Path of Wellness did set the bar low, and Little Rope has some sloppy writing and one too many lackluster moments. “Crusader” arrives with a generic dance beat and a heard-before melody that gives a cursory grumble at book-burning fascists, but its words and guitars are equally short on substance. Most of the songs are missing the band’s glorious, organized frenzy. Instead of having their voices spill over one another, simultaneously conversing and competing, Tucker and Brownstein lean on predictable, clearly delineated melodies, like during the tedious chorus of “Hunt You Down.” The wrong kind of catchy, it undoes the intriguing tension established by the verses, which are begging to be scorched by a life-changing B section. Meanwhile, the drumming—it almost goes without saying—is unremarkable throughout most of the album, just about holding down the four-by-four fort but never for a second asking for anything more. (Curiously, no drummer is credited in the liner notes. Then again, if you’re tasked with replacing the Janet Weiss, I can see why you might prefer to remain anonymous.)
Despite these shortcomings, Little Rope shows us that Sleater-Kinney are well worth sticking with, and not only because they’re back to playing “Oh!” live. They have bravely and defiantly withstood more than their share of internal and external tremors, and, though bruised, have settled into this refreshing new iteration—not as a “duo,” but as Sleater-Kinney. I think we should cut them some slack, give them a little rope; Sleater-Kinney is quite literally a two-way street, after all.
Hayden Merrick is a music writer from Brighton, UK, and co-host of the Cities to Love podcast. He contributes to Bandcamp, FLOOD, Loud and Quiet and The Line of Best Fit, and was previously associate music editor of the cultural criticism site PopMatters. Please talk to him about words and guitars: @HaydenMerrick96
