Sleater-Kinney – Little Rope

Things have shifted for Sleater-Kinney. The nineties alt-rock act’s twenty-first century reunion is no longer new. Drummer Janet Weiss left. Singer/guitarist Carrie Brownstein is no longer ‘the woman from Portlandia’ – and she lost her mother just over a year ago. That’s all channeled into the powerful new Little Rope.

Now, Sleater-Kinney still know how to do powerful kiss-offs that date back to the riot grrrl era, but also widen their energy. Opener “Hell” is a kiss-off to the world, while “Six Mistakes” is an unabashed break-up outcry. Indeed, Little Rope is strongest when the group is most in your face with their still-catchy alt-rock – see the proud “real let down” of “Don’t Feel Right”. But there’s also everything from the slyer energy of “Needlessly Wild” to the emotional crusher closer “Untidy Creature”.

The word ain’t perfect, as much as we’d like it to be, and we can’t just rest on what we did before, as much as we’d like to. After the interesting but perhaps unnecessary electronics of their last album, 2019’s The Center Won’t Hold (QRO review), Brownstein & singer/guitarist Corin Tucker have nicely returned & reinvented what has made them great, all these many years.