Little Rope by Sleater-Kinney

There is about grief the necessary aftertaste of dreaming. In the wake of sudden loss – a moment, a person, a way of being brought violently to an end – the thing lost is gone but not its outline, a strange unstable place in which festers all manner of strange unstable thinking. The rules of reality temporarily subside, and mourning makes of the world a negative space.


Plunged without warning into that space, Sleater-Kinney returns with Little Rope, one of the finest, most delicately layered records in the band’s nearly 30-year career. To call the album flawless feels like an insult to its intent – it careens headfirst into flaw, into brokenness, a meditation on what living in a world of perpetual crisis has done to us, and what we do to the world in return. On the surface, the album’s ten songs veer from spare to anthemic, catchy to deliberately hard-turning. But beneath that are perhaps the most complex and subtle arrangements of any Sleater-Kinney record, and a lyrical and emotional compass pointed firmly in the direction of something both liberating and terrifying: the sense that only way to gain control is to let it go.

In the Autumn of 2022, Carrie Brownstein received a call from Corin Tucker, who herself had just received a call from the American embassy in Italy. Years earlier, Brownstein listed Tucker as her emergency contact on a passport form, and while she had since changed her phone number, Tucker had not. The embassy staff were desperately trying to reach Brownstein. When they finally did, they told her what happened: While vacationing in Italy, Brownstein’s mother and stepfather had been in a car accident. Both were killed.

In the months that followed, Brownstein took solace in an act that felt deeply familiar – playing guitar. “I don’t think I’ve played guitar that much since my teens or early twenties,” she says. “Literally moving my fingers across the fretboard for hours on end to remind myself I was still capable of basic motor skills, of movement, of existing.”

As Brownstein and Tucker moved through the early aftermath of the tragedy, elements of what was to become the emotional backbone of Little Rope began to form – how we navigate grief, who we navigate it with, and the ways in which it transforms us. Sometimes the process of putting the songs together involved Tucker and Brownstein alone in a room with nothing more than a couple of guitars and amplifiers – a process unchanged since the band started recording in the mid-90s. Sometimes songs that started out quiet slowly transformed into something triumphant. Sometimes the triumphant ones turned out to be quiet songs in disguise.

The result is a collision of certainty and uncertainty that’s evident from the first few spare seconds of the record’s opening track, “Hell,” where over an agoraphobic expanse of tone and a trickle of chords, Little Rope’s emotional thesis statement begins to take form:

Hell don’t have no worries
Hell don’t have no past
Hell is just a signpost when you take a certain path

It’s a restrained, controlled prologue, but control is fleeting. A few seconds later, well, all hell breaks loose.