On Little Rope, Sleater-Kinney Remind Us Why We Love Them

As a whole package, the album clicks like the previous two didn’t. It’s tight and thick, glossy but bristly. It’s hot rock! The guitars come in slaloming single-string strands and fizzing slabs of fuzz. Corin Tucker still bellows like Aretha Franklin-via-Poly Styrene, as on “Untidy Creature,” an epic closer with its din of oscillating keyboards and anthemic half-time feel. She sounds just as good on the otherwise humdrum singalong single “Say It Like You Mean It,” the closest the album gets to those St Vincent-esque tendencies. Its lighters-in-the-air chorus will elicit begrudging admiration from half the OG fans and eye rolls from the other half. Some, including me, might manage both at once.

The band’s choice of producer contributes to Little Rope’s sense of synergy. John Congleton is an indie rock security blanket, a failsafe. His projects—Death Cab For Cutie’s 2022 return to form, Bully’s crunch-pop apex Sugaregg and Alvvays’ dreamy fan-fav middle child, Antisocialites—meld underground aesthetics with commercialization, grit with glitter. Congleton ensures, above all else, that Little Rope’s sonics match up with Brownstein and Tucker’s vision. And their vision was, largely, to use their music and their love for one another to light a path through grief; the album is dedicated to Brownstein’s late mother, who perished in a car accident along with her husband (Brownstein’s stepfather) in the autumn of 2022. While loss, pain and connection have always defined Sleater-Kinney’s work, Little Rope feels especially imbued with an emotional acuity and intensity, one that I don’t think they have captured this potently since “One More Hour.”

For all of this, Path of Wellness did set the bar low, and Little Rope has some sloppy writing and one too many lackluster moments. “Crusader” arrives with a generic dance beat and a heard-before melody that gives a cursory grumble at book-burning fascists, but its words and guitars are equally short on substance. Most of the songs are missing the band’s glorious, organized frenzy. Instead of having their voices spill over one another, simultaneously conversing and competing, Tucker and Brownstein lean on predictable, clearly delineated melodies, like during the tedious chorus of “Hunt You Down.” The wrong kind of catchy, it undoes the intriguing tension established by the verses, which are begging to be scorched by a life-changing B section. Meanwhile, the drumming—it almost goes without saying—is unremarkable throughout most of the album, just about holding down the four-by-four fort but never for a second asking for anything more. (Curiously, no drummer is credited in the liner notes. Then again, if you’re tasked with replacing the Janet Weiss, I can see why you might prefer to remain anonymous.)

Despite these shortcomings, Little Rope shows us that Sleater-Kinney are well worth sticking with, and not only because they’re back to playing “Oh!” live. They have bravely and defiantly withstood more than their share of internal and external tremors, and, though bruised, have settled into this refreshing new iteration—not as a “duo,” but as Sleater-Kinney. I think we should cut them some slack, give them a little rope; Sleater-Kinney is quite literally a two-way street, after all.

Hayden Merrick is a music writer from Brighton, UK, and co-host of the Cities to Love podcast. He contributes to Bandcamp, FLOOD, Loud and Quiet and The Line of Best Fit, and was previously associate music editor of the cultural criticism site PopMatters. Please talk to him about words and guitars: @HaydenMerrick96