Sleater-Kinney: ‘We lean on each other when things are difficult, and certainly these past couple of years have been tough’

One summer long ago, Carrie Brownstein shaved her head – some of it, at least – and pretended to be Sinéad O’Connor. “We all shaved the backs of our heads,” says Sleater-Kinney’s guitarist and joint vocalist, a wistful crack in her voice as she recalls her teenage obsession with the singer.

“We were too suburban to shave our entire heads,” she continues, fondly remembering her upbringing on the outskirts of Seattle, in Washington state. “We just shaved a little bit, in the back. And then we went and bought concert tickets. Sinéad O’Connor is one of the bravest artists to exist. Her bravery is close to being unmatched. She spoke out in a time when it was truly unpopular to speak out.”

Brownstein and her Sleater-Kinney bandmate, Corin Tucker, are joining by video call in late December from their homes in Portland, Oregon. They’re a thoughtful pair, speaking in long, considered sentences and never interrupting one another.

The duo’s understated mannerisms contrast with their furious alternative pop and with the equally loud acclaim they have received across their 30-year history. Rolling Stone magazine heralded Sleater-Kinney as the United States’ answer to The Clash. The New Yorker called the group a lo-fi Beatles (which would make Tucker and Brownstein the postgrunge Lennon and McCartney). Several of their LPs are now regarded as classics: Dig Me Out and The Hot Rock are essentials in any countdown of the finest alternative albums of the 1990s.

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As these two friends and former romantic partners dial in, the shutters are rolling down on a year of musical loss, in which O’Connor’s death was followed by that of Shane MacGowan. Brownstein has been doing her own grieving. In autumn 2022, as she and Tucker had just started Sleater-Kinney’s fantastically cathartic new album, Little Rope, her mother and her stepfather died in a car crash in Italy.

The terrible news arrived out of the deep grey nothingness. One morning, Tucker, whom Brownstein had listed as her emergency contact, received a call from the US embassy in Rome. Staff were trying to track down her bandmate, who at that moment was on her way to a studio in Los Angeles.

“All the songs we had written up until that point got pulled into this nascent landscape,” says Brownstein, explaining how the process of grieving and of finishing Little Rope became intertwined. “The stakes of the album were essentially raised. We were very careful and deliberate with everything we did from that point on. We wanted it to match the fragility and intensity of the moment.”

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Music was a coping mechanism. “There is almost a trance-like quality in the days, weeks and months following the death of a parent or family member,” Brownstein says. “Music was a way of grounding me and giving a shape to very formless, nebulous hours.”

The songs do not talk specifically about death. “It didn’t need to be a direct comment on the sadness. But it needed to be important. It needed to be essential. The music needed to feel transcendent in a way. And powerful and urgent. We put a lot of thought into the material we had already written or recorded the basic tracks of. We put more thought into the sonic landscape of the album – the vocal melodies and the lyrics. We treated it very intentionally. It was almost holy, in its way.”

Sleater-Kinney have been through their own upheavals. In 2019 the drummer Janet Weiss left the group, saying she no longer felt a “creative equal”. Speaking the next year, Tucker was philosophical. “One of the things about getting older and looking at life is that you realise that change will happen,” she said. “It just will. It will be difficult. That’s true whether it’s personal or political or just in life.”

To some fans, Sleater-Kinney without Weiss will always be a lesser affair. Such misgivings do not detain her former bandmates. As they navigate the currents of middle age, Tucker, who is now 51, and Brownstein, who is 49, have never sounded more plugged into each other than they do on Little Rope. Their new single, Say It Like You Mean It, is a visceral bawl born of intense creative strife by Tucker, who bumped heads with their producer John Congleton over how to finish the tune.

Struggling to lay down a satisfactory lead vocal, Tucker had gone home in a funk – only to wake at 3am with a new melody in her head. That tune, steely yet sinuous, is the beacon that lights the song – and how brightly it shines. “This goodbye hurts when you go,” Tucker sighs on the chorus, in a line pulsating with ambivalence.

It could be Brownstein singing to her mother. Or Tucker and Brownstein reflecting on their friendship, which has survived a romantic split and the apparent end of Sleater-Kinney in 2006, when, suffering collective burnout, they put the project on hiatus.

Tucker and Brownstein began Sleater-Kinney in 1994 in Olympia, with Weiss joining them two years later. The city, at the southern end of Puget Sound, had long been a hotbed for alternative music. In the 1980s it spawned the indie band Beat Happening and the spin-off label K Records, a proudly DIY enterprise whose wistful aesthetic would inspire Belle and Sebastian, among others.

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This was followed in the 1990s with Olympia’s walk-on part in the story of Nirvana. Kurt Cobain had lived in an apartment at 114 Pear Street in the centre of town, a 10-minute drive from the Sleater-Kinney interchange, after which Tucker, Brownstein and Weiss named their group.

Olympia got under Cobain’s skin. He was inspired to write Smells Like Teen Spirit after Kathleen Hanna of the band Bikini Kill graffitied the slogan on the wall of his apartment. Around the same time, Olympia emerged as a centre of riot grrrl, an uprising of female-fronted punk bands that brought a much-needed feminist perspective to independent music.

Tucker was lead singer with the year-zero riot-grrrl band Heavens to Betsy, whose 1993 single These Monsters Are Real is regarded as one of the scene’s foundation stones. Thirty years on, riot grrrl has come roaring back. The movement’s influence is cited by groups such as Goat Girl and Boygenius, whose debut album, The Record, comes with a stapled black-and-white fanzine – a proud acknowledgment of their debt to the 1990s indie aesthetic.

Yet, for Brownstein and Tucker, riot grrrl is part of their past rather than their present. They’ve moved on. When Sleater-Kinney broke up, Brownstein began a second career as a writer and star of the HBO comedy Portlandia. To resounding critical acclaim, it skewered the hipster culture that had come to define Brownstein’s adopted home. (Imagine Dublin’s Fumbally cafe if it were an entire city.)

Tucker has meanwhile recorded with Peter Buck of REM as Filthy Friends, her shrapnel lilt in perfect harmony with his indie-god guitar. But whether as Sleater-Kinney or in their other projects, they have always looked to the future rather than over their shoulders. In her 2016 memoir, Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, Brownstein explains her unease with nostalgia, especially in music. “Fandom,” she writes, “is site-specific, age-specific. Being a fan has to do with the surroundings.” You can’t go back.

It’s hard to exist and be thinking that this time is worse than before. You get stuck in a loop of sentimentality, which is really anathema to any kind of happiness

“It’s easy to vaunt the past and think it was holding up better,” Brownstein says today. “It’s much more difficult to wrestle with the current demons. Everything is very cyclical. I don’t think, in the moment in the 1990s, we knew how best to handle things any more than young people know how to handle things today.”

Whatever your age, all you can do is try to make the world better.

“It’s a lot of resistance. Sometimes it’s reactionary. It’s people doing their best with the tools that they are given. The tools today are a little bit different,” says Brownstein. “I try not to revel in any nostalgia for previous decades. Because then I feel very cynical about the present moment. It’s hard to exist and be thinking that this time is worse than before. You get stuck in a loop of sentimentality, which is really anathema to any kind of happiness.”

But things have improved. For all the progressiveness of the 1990s indie scene, it was still a boys’ world in many ways – as Sinéad O’Connor discovered when she stood up to the industry’s patriarchy and was almost destroyed in the process. Three decades later, systematic issues remain, but it hasn’t escaped Sleater-Kinney’s attention that arguably the two most influential figures in music today are women: Taylor Swift and Beyoncé.

“Taylor Swift is fully in control of her career, right? When she had that falling-out with her manager and was sort of getting screwed, because of him owning the masters, she was like, well, nope, I’m gonna re-record all those albums,” says Tucker. “That’s a real understanding of the music business and a real taking control of your business and your finances in a way that women have not had access to for a long time.

“That’s important. I wish there were more music executives and record labels run by women. There are a lot more women in power at those labels and at positions of power. We’ve made progress for sure. There’s a little bit further to go. It’s important to look at what artists like Beyoncé and Taylor Swift have done and that they see themselves as businesspeople. That’s important. If someone else is controlling the money, they can control your career.”

Sleater-Kinney have yet to announce an Irish date for their new tour. Audiences here will be crossing fingers they make the trip. Their most recent show in Ireland, at Vicar Street in Dublin in March 2020, was memorably cathartic. For many in attendance it would be their last experience of live music before the pandemic.

“We were on tour in Europe and the coronavirus was getting strong. Obviously, there were all the people dying in Italy. It was terrible,” says Tucker. “Things started changing. Countries’ borders started closing. We didn’t know what was going to happen. And so we had played London maybe the night before [Dublin]. And we got all these texts, like, ‘I can’t make it; I’m not feeling well.’

“I don’t think we understood the full complexity of what was happening. It was frightening. And I do think there was, like, the first case of Covid in Ireland when we were there. It was a weird combination of feelings, because that show was so fun. But, at the same time, I do think we felt like we were on the verge of something frightening.”

They have survived, as has their fan base. And while 2024 is sure to have its challenges, how better to begin it than with an indie-rock album sure to make the pulse quicken and the heart flutter?

“We’ve been friends a long time. That’s important, our actual friendship,” says Tucker. “That’s sort of the core of making something with another person: that relationship. We lean on each other when things are difficult, and certainly these past couple of years have been tough. We use the band to cheer each other up.”

Little Rope is released on Friday, January 19th