Sleater-Kinney’s 10 (or Actually 11) Best Songs

Dear listeners,

I first heard the band Sleater-Kinney when I was a teenager, and it’s not an exaggeration to say it changed my life. The early 2000s were a particularly macho time in rock music — all wounded emo boys and nü-metal aggressors — and even in the late ’90s it was difficult to find female musicians lauded for how well they played their instruments rather than the way they looked. Then I happened upon a live recording of Sleater-Kinney playing its 1997 song “Words and Guitar,” and it blew my hair back like I’d entered a wind tunnel.

The band sounded huge — loud and furious and virtuosic in its precision. The drummer, Janet Weiss, played harder than pretty much anyone I’d ever seen, of any gender, and she sometimes wore pigtails. Clearly, that meant I could do anything. Clearly, this was the best band in the universe.

I still believe that Sleater-Kinney’s two-decade, eight-album stretch from 1995 to 2015 ranks among the strongest runs ever by an American band. But its last three albums, released since Weiss left the group, have largely left me cold. That was an inconvenient truth I had to confront this week when I reviewed Sleater-Kinney’s latest release, “Little Rope.”

The album is a dark, brooding meditation on grief — the guitarist and singer Carrie Brownstein lost her mother and stepfather while she was writing these songs — and it does have fleeting moments of that old magic. But I’d be lying, or blindly stanning, if I said I rank this new album with the band’s best work. Something difficult about being a music fan and a critic is the fact that our longtime faves still have the potential to disappoint us.