'Little Rope' makes grief palpable

Sleater-Kinney’s new album is about finding a light in the darkness, coping with loss through friendship, communion, and hard-headed stubbornness

- BHANUJ KAPPAL

Late in 2022, Carrie Brownstein half of the influential feminist rock act Sleater-Kinney on the way to the studio when she got a call from long-time friend and bandmate Corin Tucker. Someone at the US embassy in Italy was trying to get in touch with Brownstein. Suspecting it was a prank, she headed into a recording session for Little Rope, Sleater-Kinney's 11th studio album. When she checked her phone a couple of hours later though, she had terrible news. Her mother and stepfather, vacationing in Italy, had died in a car crash. Devastated, Brownstein threw herself into the album's recording, finding refuge in the comfortable rituals of playing music. "Guitar was a way of giving myself shape again," she said in an interview to NPR. "And to create songs with it was a way of giving form to something that felt very nebulous."

Brownstein's grief is palpable on Little Rope, infusing the album's 10 tracks about societal despair, depression and existential burnout with a sense of deeply personal pathos. You can hear it in her voice on the dance-punk anthem Hunt You Down, as she sings of things left unsaid: "I forgive you, I wish I'd told you so." It's there in the fuzzed-out, disintegrating guitars of Six Mistakes, Tucker's stripped-back vibrato emerging from dark clouds of detuned loss. It anchors the anxiety-edged mania of Don't Feel Right, with its lyrics about driving through the night to "drown the pain out".