You don’t name your record Little Rope if everything’s fine. And Sleater-Kinney, of course, are not in the business of pretending things are fine.
Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker are back with one of their most visceral albums yet—ten songs that howl, shimmer, and stretch across a terrain shaped by grief, friendship, and the quiet violence of getting through a day. And yet, somehow, Little Rope also bangs.
“This record is a journey,” Corin says. “We started writing songs that were personal, emotional. Everyone was going through something after the pandemic, but then…” She trails off. The “then” is the sudden loss of Carrie’s mother and stepfather in a car accident while the band was mid-recording. The music they were already writing—already aching—took on a different weight.
“I just wasn’t in a place where I could sing as much,” Carrie says. “So Corin sings more on this record than she has in a long time. There’s a lot of care in the arrangements. A lot of urgency.”
That urgency hits immediately. The first track, “Hell,” starts like a plunge—no gentle build, no polite handshake. “We wanted to drop the listener into the world,” Corin says. “It’s dark, it’s sinister, but there’s melody. There’s this chorus where we’re all just yelling together. Like, we’re all in this.”
And “this,” for Sleater-Kinney, isn’t just personal tragedy. It’s the existential weirdness of post-lockdown life. The feeling of dislocation. The precarious balance between collapse and momentum. Or as Carrie puts it: “It’s not a dark record, really. It’s about being between two states. Despair and joy. It’s wrestling with both.”
That tension—between grief and motion, heaviness and hook—is where Little Rope lives. It’s a Sleater-Kinney album that feels like a Sleater-Kinney album, but the angles have shifted. “Say It Like You Mean It” pulses with clarity, while “Don’t Feel Right” wallows and grinds. “It’s like a love letter to the people who stick around when you're unraveling,” Carrie says. “When you’re in despair and you don’t have language for it yet.”
Still, there’s an energy to these songs that makes them feel… fun? Maybe not fun in the theme-park sense. More like catharsis you can move to. “That’s just who we are,” Corin says. “We have silly, manic moments, dark moments. But we do it together. That’s what this record is saying.”
They credit longtime producer John Congleton with helping shape the sound—while also nudging them out of their comfort zone. “He’s like our perennial rascal,” Carrie says, laughing. “He knows what we’re capable of but also wants to mess things up just enough. Keep people surprised.”
That surprise is part of the DNA now. Nearly thirty years into their run, Sleater-Kinney are still tweaking the formula—not abandoning it, just rebalancing. Carrie’s guitars have a rubbery weirdness here. Corin’s vocals slide from gentle to unhinged in the space of a verse. “I approached things differently,” she says. “Sometimes I’d come back and do a lighter version, to give the chorus more room to land. I’ve learned to give myself runway.”
That balance—between rawness and restraint, eruption and intention—makes Little Rope one of their most affecting albums since The Woods. And while the lyrical themes might be heavy, there’s lift. Especially by the end.
“I think we leave people with a sliver of hope,” Corin says. “The last lines of the album—‘I’ll find a way, I’ll pick your lock’—there’s still fight there. Still some punk rock left in us.”
That balance even shows up on the cover art, a surreal image of Carrie floating in water. “We were really drawn to Sophia Nahli Allison’s work,” she says. “There’s this eerie serenity. You’re floating, but maybe you’re about to fall. There’s tension, even in the quiet moments.”
And then there’s J. Smith-Cameron—Succession’s Gerri—who stars in the music video for “Say It Like You Mean It.” “I noticed she followed me on Instagram,” Carrie says. “So I asked. She hadn’t done a music video before. She took it seriously, and we had a blast.”
It all adds up to a band still doing what great bands should: evolving without shapeshifting, writing what they feel without drowning in it, and trusting that whatever they’re building, someone else out there probably needs it too.
“We’re still fighting,” Corin says. “And we want people to know they’re not alone in that.”
Even if it sometimes feels like we're all hanging on by just a little rope.
Watch the interview above and then check out the video below.
