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

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    As the band’s 11th album arrives, listen back through the strongest moments in its catalog.From left: Janet Weiss (formerly of Sleater-Kinney), Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker.Chad Batka for The New York TimesDear 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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      Sleater-Kinney ‘Little Rope’ Review: 11th Album Born From Tragedy

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      The band’s 11th album, “Little Rope,” was born out of tragedy, but feels curiously restrained.Nearly 20 years ago, when Sleater-Kinney released its towering seventh album, “The Woods,” there was a convincing case to be made that the trio was the most vital, and underrated, working American rock band.Born of the fervent feminist spirit of the riot grrrl movement and the Pacific Northwest’s fertile D.I.Y. scene, the group spent the second half of the ’90s releasing increasingly sophisticated punk albums and eventually, on its righteous 2002 release “One Beat,” maturing into one of the few indie-rock bands making meaningful protest music in the aftermath of 9/11.On “The Woods,” Sleater-Kinney managed to kick things into an even higher gear. The twitchy electricity of Carrie Brownstein’s guitar, the embodied howl of Corin Tucker’s vocals and the earth-quaking force of Janet Weiss’s drums collided in a glorious cacophony, making noise that sounded less like songs than melodic thunderstorms.There are dim echoes of that fury on “Little Rope,” Sleater-Kinney’s 11th album and its second since Weiss’s departure in 2019. The new LP has more oomph and darkness than the band’s self-produced 2021 LP “Path of Wellness” and more emotional resonance than its mechanical 2019 effort “The Center Won’t Hold.” But even in its wildest moments, when compared to the band’s mightiest work, “Little Rope” sounds unfortunately diminished and curiously restrained.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More