No work of art exists in a vacuum. But if we imagined for a moment that the 11th album by Sleater-Kinney – the evergreen duo of singing guitarists Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker – had arrived free of context, without the baggage of life events, its 10 songs might land in certain ways, and maybe not others.
Perhaps the sharpness of its pointillist post-punk would garner effusive praise, or the crackle of its melodies. Little Rope feels, after all, like one of Sleater-Kinney’s most taut and focused outings, with every crisp guitar line and expressive vocal showcased in textured relief, standing proud with space around it like the raised print on an old-style debit card. Kudos is due in part to producer John Congleton, who has previously worked with artists such as St Vincent, who herself produced Sleater-Kinney’s last album but one, The Center Won’t Hold (2019).
Little Rope barrels along too, as though it has no time to waste. The sucked-in cheeks and swagger of its most obvious pop song, Needlessly Wild, speaks gleefully of someone – probably female – cutting loose from their binds, behaving erratically as a liberation. Despite a hiatus from 2006 to 2014, Sleater-Kinney are among the most enduring of all the bands who grew out of the riot grrrl movement in the Pacific northwest of the US. They have long advocated for awkward, self-determining forms of self-expression.
“Get up, girl, and dress yourself in clothes you love for a world you hate,” sings Brownstein on Dress Yourself, a song that offers encouragement to people dragging themselves through their day-to-day lives in our state of permacrisis. A track such as Six Mistakes, meanwhile, questions the nature of reality. Its prowling guitar betrays a stalker-ish plot. “Is it all in my head, the life I’m living?” wails Tucker.
There are, however, all sorts of reasons why people might need encouragement to get dressed, or why someone’s grip on reality might loosen. Much of Little Rope had been sketched out before one defining event shaped it further: the death of Brownstein’s mother and stepfather in a car crash in autumn 2022.
One immediate consequence of her bereavement is that the physicality of a familiar, grounding guitar practice became crucial to Brownstein getting through the aftermath of grief. “It feels so arbitrary sometimes, to be alive,” she told the Guardian last month.
Pain and bewilderment are, then, Little Rope’s defining characteristics, although not its only flavours. The defiant Untidy Creature, the closing track, supplies a reaction to the overturning of Roe v Wade by the US supreme court in 2022, ending the federal right to legal abortion, dragging the clock backwards on female self-determination.
Say It Like You Mean It could be Sleater-Kinney’s most mainstream song yet, a full-throated goodbye to love whose Brownstein-directed video starring Succession’s Gerri Kellman – the actor J Smith-Cameron – might nod, elliptically, at the invisibility of older women, as well as the despair at not being seen within a relationship.
The deep heartache of Say It Like You Mean It (“the clocks have stopped”), though, echoes WH Auden’s Funeral Blues (“stop all the clocks”). Throughout Little Rope, lyrics about one feeling expand to apply to others so often it feels like an oxygen mask would be handy, so regular are the sharp intakes of breath those slippages elicit. Everywhere, the protagonists of Little Rope’s songs are reeling, clawing their ways across the ground, pleading for gentleness, struggling with basic tasks.
“Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path,” reflects the opening track, Hell – underlining how you can find yourself there almost casually, if circumstances dictate. “I’ve been down so long, I pay rent to the floor,” pouts Tucker on Hunt You Down, a defiantly stylish treatment of dread. “The thing you fear the most will hunt you down,” warns the chorus.
Crucially, though, these 10 songs are not sad; there isn’t a wallow in sight. Don’t Feel Right is an out-and-out banger, a feelgood song about feeling awful that, in its deceptively upbeat list of things to do, faintly recalls, of all things, Alright by Supergrass. There is no right way to grieve, but it feels as though shock and sorrow have only made Sleater-Kinney seize their day and prioritise.
Little Rope is released on 19 January
This article was amended on 15 January 2024. Carrie Brownstein, not Corin Tucker, sings Dress Yourself, as well as lead vocal on several other tracks. An earlier version stated that Brownstein sings no lead vocals on the album.
