Fifteen years ago, Carrie Brownstein, one half of feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney, was getting her hair cut when rowdy guitars started blaring through the salon’s speakers. What is this song, she thought, and who is this woman screaming? It took her a further 15 seconds to realise that the roars belonged to her bandmate, Corin Tucker. Their sound was scrappier than Brownstein remembered. The song she’d struggled to recognise? Dig Me Out: a galloping three-minute track that catapulted the band to international acclaim in 1997.
“We’ve been doing this for so long,” Brownstein smiles on a rainy afternoon in London. Brownstein and Tucker were barely out of their teens when they came up with a “fly-by-night” name for what they imagined would be a fleeting venture, inspired by the sign for Sleater Kinney Road near their practice space in the Washington suburb of Olympia. Little did they know, three decades on, they’d still be here. “It’s kind of amazing,” Tucker says, “but we’ve also nurtured it.”
