Influential, unapologetic, uncompromising – across three decades, Sleater-Kinney’s Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker have crystallised these tenets across a shifting soundscape. Hailing from Olympia, Washington, the iconic group formed in the 90s, playing a pivotal role in influencing the counter-culture riot grrrl movement before evolving into a more expansive and experimental outfit. Throughout, Sleater-Kinney has remained a steadfast vehicle of empowerment.

With the arrival of their eleventh album Little Rope – their first in three years – Brownstein and Tucker present a sonic rumination on grief and loss – a beautifully layered and cathartic exploration of the liminal space between sorrow and joy. The album is marked by tragedy – that of sudden personal loss, and also the current political atmosphere. While many of the songs had already been written, Brownstein received devastating news last fall that her mother and stepfather had been killed in a car accident while on holiday overseas. This moved Brownstein and Tucker to come together into a sacred space of creation, reapproaching their songs with an added dimension of balanced fragility and raw liberation.

“Little Rope just had a way of being all of those things. You know, the tension of a rope, but also the way that it can have slack as well. It contains multitudes,” shares Brownstein of the album. Working with producer John Congleton (St. Vincent, Angel Olsen) the duo dive through complex states of being across tracks with both delicacy and the raw energy they’re synonymous with. Little Rope is a victory, a testament to embracing life while navigating the liminal spaces in between, and getting to the other side.

J.L. Sirisuk: In terms of the genesis of this album, I know you had written some songs before actually recording this album. Can you give me an idea of the timeline in terms of when some of the songs were written before you actually started recording them?
Carrie Brownstein: All of the songs were written before we went into the studio, and we actually started writing in 2021. Untidy Creature was definitely the first song we wrote for this album – as often is the case with the first song we write for an album, it’s kind of a transitional song. We’re never sure if it’s a remnant of the last thing we’ve done, or the official start of the new thing, and often that song becomes the seed for the new album, but then gets left behind.

We wrote extensively at the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022, and then went into the studio in August and recorded about five of the songs with John Congleton. After that, we knew we had to keep writing songs and it allowed us to assess the current landscape of the album in terms of tempo and what we might need. It was advantageous to break so that we could focus on the writing to really create a world and make sure it had all the dynamics and dimensions that we wanted. Unfortunately, also in that interim my mother and stepfather were killed in an accident. That of course affected the process, affected my state of being. I was dropped into this intense grief, but we continued writing – not because we had to. There was no sense of imperative or deadline, but the task of songwriting, the doing and the making of it helped orient me in a confounding time. The stakes were raised so significantly that even the songs we had recorded in August had to be reassessed. The state we were in really coloured the rest of the album.

JLS: In terms of revisiting the work while going through loss, did this lead you to experience music and creation differently? 
Corin Tucker: The whole atmosphere, as Carrie was describing, became more intensified and emotional. It’s not like it raised the question of, “Are we going to keep making the record?” Carrie was vocal like, “I just want to work. I just want to keep working on music.” It’s a challenge to keep going when someone’s going through something so heavy – it makes things feel more meaningful and purposeful. It made us work harder to make sure we were writing to the best of our abilities and handling everything. We both felt like we needed to step up, be present, and finish the record.

“It’s a challenge to keep going when someone’s going through something so heavy”

JLS: This brings me to the title Little Rope. It makes me think of those little pushes and pulls, the oscillations of emotion. Can you tell me what that title means to you?
CB: The title comes from the song Small Finds. Corin sings, “Give me a little rope.” We thought it was evocative as a title for the entire album because it possesses that duality of signifying potentially the most dire, desperate moment. You know, wanting to end it all or conversely, that the rope is what pulls you out. Someone throws you a rope and you’re able to lift yourself from a state of despondency or darkness, and it felt like the album itself was wrestling with those disparate states – and not always disparate states. Sometimes when those things intertwine, that in-betweenness of holding something sorrowful and joyful in the same moment and not always needing it to, or being able to separate. Feelings of happy-sad or unease and comfort can coexist. The album is an exploration and embrace of that, and I think there is a restless quality to the music. Sometimes it’s rageful, sometimes it’s exuberant. But it’s always a little bit fragile – and that doesn’t mean it was quiet, but there is a sense of being on a ledge. Little Rope just had a way of being all of those things. You know, the tension of a rope, but also the way it can have slack as well. It contains multitudes.

JLS: The opening track Hell completely pulled me in. How did you decide on this as the opener?
CT: We wanted something that really pulled the listener in. We wanted the album to be a world that the listener is dropped into, and I think Hell presents the kind of depth we wanted to go to. We knew we were writing a rather dark album that’s wrestling with a lot of difficult things and it’s not like, “Here’s what we’re going to do to fix these things.” It was more about pulling us into a place of mess and grappling with things. I think Hell felt like we would immediately go there from the beginning of the song.

JLS: What led you to work with John Congleton on this record? What do you think he was able to add to the record?
CB: He really knows how to elicit strong performances. He knows what the strengths are in Sleater-Kinney and was very intent on pulling stellar vocal performances from us, and making sure the guitar tones matched the emotionality of the song. He is unafraid to conjure ugliness. He is not a perfectionist, but he also strives to find what is perfect for the song. There is always something a little bit weird and strange and grimy about Sleater-Kinney, and I think he likes being in that space as well. He also creates ambience and atmosphere in ways that help establish mood. John has such a good ear for finding a way to dial up a motif or create sonic through-lines. I hear moments of corrosiveness that come back and forth, or eeriness – a sinister quality that reoccurs, and then things that are very beautiful. He really brought out that landscape.
CT: John is a really great producer in that he knew my voice going into making the record. He knew what I was capable of, and he pushed me super hard in certain songs to create a great arc in my voice. Whether it was eliciting a certain performance or suggesting that the vocal melody wasn’t quite there, like on Say It Like You Mean It. When I started singing the song, he said, “I don’t think this is quite there in terms of the melody.” Which was frustrating, but I did go home, rewrote the vocal melody and came back the next day. Once I started singing the beginning of the song in a different place, he was like, “That’s it. We’ll go here in terms of where the voice goes during the song.” It gave the song a wider path, a bigger arc for the listener to experience. He helped me grow as both a writer and performer.

“There is always something a little bit weird and strange and grimy about Sleater-Kinney…”

JLS: And in terms of putting the songs together and recording, was there a routine or did you just sit in the room for days?
CT: For this album we probably worked harder than we’ve ever worked on having a very strong and large batch of songs. That process took over a year of writing and we used every methodology. Sometimes we had to get together in a room and play guitar, other times we’d send files back and forth. Sometimes we’d write something, demo it, but we didn’t have quite the right chorus, so I’d go to Carrie’s house and we’d work on that together in person. Over the years we’ve done all these different ways of writing songs, and I feel like we used all of those on this record. We really wanted the songs to be strong, and then we went into the studio from there. We recorded like thirteen or fourteen songs, but we were still editing as things were getting mixed and thinking about the sequence. The processes took us a long time.
CB: For all the deliberation, editing, fine-tuning and all that’s arduous, in the end, there’s still always something ineffable and kind of magical about it. When I look back, it’s true of every album. I sometimes don’t know how we did it. You know, I’ll listen to a certain song and wonder how it all came together. That’s sort of the magic of music. After you put in all the work, all the intention, there’s still meaning above all that. There’s something that transcends. I hear this sonic world we made – it’s both lived in and other-worldly.

JLS: Is there any track in particular that started one way but during recording went through a change that surprised you?
CT: I feel like Small Finds is a little bit like that because it’s a weird song, and it’s such a discordant, weird, guitar thing. The vocals are weird. It’s a character-based song, for sure. It felt like a gamble even recording it. John was like, “I’m not sure I get this song” – but we worked on it really hard in the studio to make the tones interesting enough and make the vocal performance compelling enough, to the point where I sort of pulled ahead. Suddenly it arrived as a world you get dropped into. That felt really cool.

“Sometimes it’s rageful, sometimes it’s exuberant. But it’s always a little bit fragile…”

JLS: This album feels like a real testament to duality, the light and dark, just being able to accept that you don’t have to be in one place over another. You can swim in all of it and let the emotions wash over you. When you listen to the album now, what do you feel?
CT: I appreciate what you said about the album. A really big part of what we were trying to do with the songs is create a space where we’re thinking of things, we’re wrestling with things and we don’t necessarily come out the other side with an answer or anything other than the joy of naming it – of being alive. It’s being in the moment, and trying to find that there’s pleasure in that. That’s what I think the album is trying to do, and that’s what I get from it.
CB: When I listen to it, I feel proud of the commitment to each other, and to music and faith in the present moment, despite all of the heartache of the present; to reckon with the hurt and desire to keep going despite it. I hear that in the music, and it makes me hopeful and grateful to be alive to do it.

Little Rope is now out via Loma Vista