Sleater-Kinney – Little Rope

4 stars

 Opening an album with a track called ‘Hell’ is something of a gauntlet-slapping giveaway of things to come on Sleater-Kinney’s eleventh album, their fourth studio outing since Carrie Brownstein, Corin Tucker and drummer Janet Weiss reunited in 2014. With Weiss departing in 2019, Brownstein and Tucker may no longer be the punky upstarts of yore, but their confessional meditations on loss, grief, confusion and crisis are  born from hard lived experience.

 

This is certainly the case on ‘Little Rope’, recorded in the shadow of the deaths of Brownstein’s parents in a car crash. While much of the album was written before the accident, it nevertheless gives the record its emotional heart. Like Tucker sings on ‘Hunt You Down’, ‘the thing you fear the most will hunt you down’.

 

Despite this, ‘Little Rope’ isn’t the unfettered howl one might expect. Rather, the pain has been channelled into a well-crafted and eminently grown-up collection tinged with depth and nuance. That’s not to say any edges have been blunted. Producer John Congleton wraps things in a dense and crunchy sheen, but the rawness and vulnerability remain across the record’s ten tracks.

 

Second single, ‘Say it Like You Mean it’, is a last gasp challenge to a departing lover that is both defiant and redemptive. It is also a great pop song. As too is the stadium sized bounce of ‘Crusader’. Most affecting moment of all comes on ‘Dress Yourself’, a spiky nouveau power ballad and cracked anthem in waiting for disaffected middle youth trying to keep it together.

 

The artistry that pervades beyond the record’s troubled pulse is itself a form of redemption, as Brownstein and Tucker try to make sense of the world on a record full of scars that sounds like a purging.

 

Little Rope is released on 19^thJanuary on Loma Vista Records

The List, December 2023

 

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